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A proper city should be car-free. Waymos will just reinforce urban hellscapes like LA or Houston and make it impossible to become the next Amsterdam.
Living in Aarhus a while now and I don't think I've been in a taxi in over a year. The last one I remember being in was a late night/early morning fixed fare to the airport in Portugal.
I also use Bolt (similar to Uber) for when I need to get somewhere quicker, though it can be way more expensive - yesterday I went to a software development seminar and the cost for the ride was just over 12 EUR for that.
Either way, I immensely appreciate that for the most part I can just walk to whatever stores and such I need, I don't like the idea of needing a car to just get my necessities (living in the countryside is more like that, when there's a bus to the nearby city where the stores are just a few times per day).
Wish they didn't close down a few train routes through the country, though.
A personal car is freedom.
"Car free" doesn't mean "ban all the cars":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoAtoaAgm0g
0. This discussion is about urban environments. Suburbs/rural areas will probably be car centric forever (or at least for a long time). If you don't or plan to live in a city, you should move on from this conversation.
1. Of course you'll be able to use car or van to move furniture.
> And take your children and their equipment to activities, etc.
2. What kind of equipment do said children have, pianos??? You can use public transport perfectly well.
In dense enough environments with decent public transit things are generally not that far away by public transit. And a backpack + at least 1 big bag/1 trolley bag fit perfectly well in all but the most crowded public transit.
> Nevermind the issues of poor timetabling and service for public transport, and the risk of crime.
3. All of these are resolved when large amounts of people use public transport and people actually care about it. If it's only for poor people.. yeah, you get US public transit. And regarding crime, fairly sure that in most places your overall risk of death/serious injury is still higher in a car.
* * *
> A personal car is freedom.
A personal car is freedom.
Being forced to only use personal cars everywhere and at all times is slavery.
Isn't that exactly what it means? Like smoke free means no smoking. Why this "abolish the police" situation again?
> You can use public transport perfectly well.
But it's a lot more expensive, e.g. I live in Stockholm and it's about $4 per 90-minute trip, per person.
> Being forced to only use personal cars everywhere and at all times is slavery.
Yeah, I don't want that either, I really hated that in parts of the US and Mexico. Like where you can't even cross the street because there's a big road in between.
Watch the video linked inked above, it answers your exact questions.
Also, smoking as a thing isn't banned. Smoking is just banned in reasonable places.
But instead of debating me, please watch the video. No place on this planet with more than, say, 10 000 people (so places where probably 80% of the world population lives) banned cars. A few amusement parks (or equivalent) are basically the only places where cars are banned.
> But it's a lot more expensive, e.g. I live in Stockholm and it's about $4 per 90-minute trip, per person.
What is this insanity? Doesn't Stockholm have a fixed cost monthly pass?
It does, but it costs ~$106 a month.
That's what happens when there's no competition.
Automated self-driving taxi services will be better.
Bucharest, a city in a much poorer country, charges about €16 for a 1 month pass for surface transport and €20 for a 1 month pass for the subway. That's about €36.
The average salary in Stockholm seems to be about €46 000. The average salary in Bucharest is less than €24 000.
So €100 per month seems about fair for what I assume is a pretty solid public transport network in a place with far more disposable income than Bucharest.
Edit: Switzerland is famous for having a very well run public transport system. The Zurich monthly pass for all zones is about €250 per month... Yeah, Zurich has higher incomes for sure. Stockholm probably has a decent rate for public transportation. Privatizing it won't help, like it didn't in many places in the world (see England).
And we have 0 proof for the private sector being cheaper. Privatization of transport is almost universally a disaster, even for cars and roads, frequently the costs are just hidden in a million places: budget deficits for road infrastructure, ever increasing public debt due to it, ever increasing car prices, road infrastructure budgets being distributed in a million places, etc.
Uber was sort of cheaper for a while during ZIRP and thanks to massive price dumping/subsidizing due to VC investments while trying to corner the market. Now Uber is basically the same cost as regular taxis...
Everyone benefits from more people using public transport instead of cars, so it's in the public's interest to incentivize it.
Rent a van? I do that when I have a car too. Or use a moving company.
> And take your children and their equipment to activities
I currently live in a car centric location and it's true that you just need a car to do those things. But I've also lived in places that are not car centric and you don't need a car to do those things in those places. You can either get there by bike (which is usually faster than by car for short journeys when you can just get on and go and then get off and leave right outside the destination rather than having to find a space), or use public transport which is very reliable. Where I lived there was a bus every 15 minutes that took you to a train station where the trains ran from the suburb to the city every 5 minutes.
> risk of crime
I feel like those places that prioritise non car transport don't have this problem. I never felt unsafe cycling or taking my kids on the public transport.
> A personal car is freedom.
It can be. It can also be a weight around your neck. It's expensive. You have to park it when you go anywhere, and that also means you have to get back to it. You can't just change plans and end up in a different part of the city and be OK because you can just take a different route back to your house, you have to get back to your car and hope you paid for enough parking.
Some places just aren't densely populated enough to ever make public transport work well. Many places are though, even quite small cities, and then it's freedom to not have a car. The thing about not having a car is that you can always get a car if you need one for a particular thing, rent or use various services that provide them, or taxi/uber, or borrow one from a friend. But if you have a car and live where you need one all the time then you're stuck with that.
So you're going to drive a car after all?
> Or use a moving company.
You can do that if you move between apartments (and can afford to pay the service), but not if you're getting a few things spontaneously.
> Some places just aren't densely populated enough to ever make public transport work well. Many places are though, even quite small cities, and then it's freedom to not have a car.
That's why it's never either-or but typically both. Most people need, and have, access to a car in one way or another. That doesn't mean they don't use the public transport, bicycle, or walk by foot when they can.
I'm sorry, which parts of Europe have you been to, exactly? Many countries in EU are at the forefront of digitization, years ahead of US in most areas when it comes to banking and civil admin matters.
And not to be rude, but when you go to US it feels like a museum - you see those things called checks that my dad used to tell me about that people pay and are paid with(!!!!), and people still swipe their payment cards like it's 1995. For a country that has the biggest tech companies in the world it's not even in the 21st century on some fronts.
Oh and guess what Apple needed you to do to open a developer account just 10 years ago - that's right, a Fax with your details. I don't think there were any fax machines left in my country by then, I've had to use an online service to send it.
I agree the US is far behind on fin-tech. Actually "developing" countries like Turkey, UAE and China are really far ahead here.
But the real issue is that Europe has no OpenAI (Mistral isn't as competitive) or Google or Microsoft or Anthropic or Amazon or Apple or Waymo - Europe is instead dependent on these companies (see the other post here regarding the sanctions on the ICC blocking all their Microsoft and Google accounts).
While the US still has some way to advance in consumer tech (and is being outpaced by China there), there is at least the opportunity in those innovative, growing companies.
Probably Germany. Even Austria phased out faxes a year or two ago.
The thing that blew my mind more than anything was the archaic financial tech in place. No chip and pin and instead swiping cards, cheques etc. in one instance the ticket machine in the Chicago subway requested a US zip code to use my card. I was baffled, zip code? Surely this is a typo and it wants a pin. Nope. A zip is what it wanted. When I spoke to a police officer he informed me to just put 0 and it will work. Lo and behold, it did.
It haunts me to this day.
It's fine for me if y'all decide that's the course to take, y'all voted for this after all, but here in Europe, we prefer doing things the right way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
And we can (and do) make our cities safer to reduce road fatalities and injuries... Germany for example, even though it has Autobahns with unlimited speed, has about ~2800 fatalities per year on a population of about 84 million people. The Netherlands have ~700 road fatalities a year on 18 million people. The US in contrast has ~40.000 fatalities on a population of 340 million - about 4 times the fatality rate of Germany and the Netherlands.
And yes, I am comparing based on populations because the availability of decent public transport is key in reducing vehicular accidents.
Because there are companies like Tesla that keep putting up cars with inadequate technology (cameras instead of LIDAR/radar) or testing on the road and people die as a result of this penny pinching, but no one at Tesla got punished in any way or form for this decision.
On top of that we got the way over the top marketing claims, which routinely leads to one scenario: Tesla drivers engaging the autopilot and playing games on their phones, followed by the autopilot either unable to detect a dangerous situation or disengage once the crash becomes inevitable so it doesn't get counted as an Autopilot incident [1].
At this point, it is willful negligence but we don't have a way to hold Tesla accountable. That is why I want to see high-ranking executives, up to and including its CEO, be held on trial for manslaughter at least.
And hell even here in Europe, Tesla's garbage on wheels causes issues. Both in Germany [2] and Sweden [3] we have had drivers fall asleep for minutes while Autopilot was engaged. This kind of crap was promised to not happen, but apparently someone at Tesla fucked that up. I'm amazed that Autopilot has held up and prevented either driver from actually crashing into something, but the failure of engaging safety mode and come to a safe stop if the driver becomes inattentive for whatever reason is inacceptable, period.
And it's not just Tesla that fails to deal with the damages their shit technology causes. Remember Waymo's honking incidents that went on for weeks [4]? At a minimum, this shit should have led to a) immediate cessation of operation, b) damages being paid to the neighbors who got hit by this noise and c) to a fully transparent audit which uncovers why that happened and what steps were made to prevent a reoccurence.
I'm sick and tired of multi-billion dollar megacorporations using the general populace as a free testbed for their crap instead of doing the proper thing that everyone else does - test on closed-off roads and dedicated test tracks.
[1] https://electrek.co/2025/03/17/tesla-fans-exposes-shadiness-...
[2] https://news.sky.com/story/police-in-germany-chase-tesla-for...
[3] https://www.carscoops.com/2024/04/sleeping-tesla-driver-crui...
[4] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/11/24218134/waymo-parking-lo...
As said: when a human kills or maims someone with a car, that human gets consequences to feel. When a corporation does the same, they have to pay pittances and that's it. This cannot stand any longer.
Would you simultaneously prefer being able to accuse someone who is involved in a car fatality of being a murderer for being basically stupid and careless (like almost everyone is once in a while) and unlucky at the same time, when different technology (autonomous driving) likely would have prevented the accident in the first place?
That's about the kind of claim you would expect from someone openly claiming connections with Antifa.
Intentions (especially those projected by some onto others) don't matter much -- it's the result, the numbers (here, fatalities) that make all the difference.
You did notice that I singled out Tesla and Waymo here, correct? BMW for example does stuff the right way - they opened a dedicated test track in 2023 [1] instead of developing on the open road, Volkswagen does their testing with a human safety driver behind the wheel [2], and Mercedes had their Level 3 system actually certified and audited, a worldwide first by the way [3].
I don't have anything against autonomous vehicles, in fact I believe they are a vital solution to providing individual mobility in rural areas that can't ever be economically served by public transport.
All I want is that companies don't outsource costs to society at large. Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen do this, Waymo and Tesla don't. They just do whatever they want, zero considerations and zero effort, while our industry does things by the book and has more expenses as a result.
> That's about the kind of claim you would expect from someone openly claiming connections with Antifa.
That's a low blow, you know it, and you also know it's against HN rules.
[1] https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/deutschland/article/detail/T0...
[2] https://www.spiegel.de/auto/aktuell/hamburg-volkswagen-teste...
[3] https://www.tuv.com/presse/de/meldungen/automatisches-spurha...
Yes I did notice, and do the numbers and results that we are talking about not apply to them? Do you have more ammunition to continue to use the term free-to-kill, or want to consider if the use of the term may be a bit ideology laden?
They do but still I'm not willing to give these two multi-billion dollar megacorps a hall pass for penny pinching with deadly results when our car industry shows that better ways of doing things exist.
Not everything needs to be done by the typical Silicon Valley strategy of "move fast, break things" - especially not when the things being broken are literal human lives.
Calling Teslas garbage on wheels doesn't help either, when the accident and defect statistics seem to indicate otherwise. Not a Tesla fanboy by the way, but the discussion around Tesla seems to me to be unfair especially in certain circles.
Uh, Tesla routinely has people wait for months for spare parts [1]. Bad logistics, okay, excusable for a company just a year or two in business, but Tesla is in for well over a decade now. That's also a contributor in why Tesla vehicles cost significantly more to insure [2], with reports of carriers refusing Tesla vehicles at all cropping up even a year ago [3], and all models being listed as "difficult to insure" in NYC [4]. In Germany, the situation appears to be similar, with serious premiums compared to other cars [5]. And that's all before thinking about the current wave of politically motivated vandalism - say some idiot bashes in a window, good luck getting a replacement in time, not to mention the insurance premium hike that's inevitable after filing a claim.
As for defects, well, the build quality of the Cybertruck is so much a meme at this point that I won't waste time researching on it. Steel sheets literally falling off the vehicle. The bloody thing turning rusty from ordinary rain. No matter what, that's inacceptable.
> Not a Tesla fanboy by the way, but the discussion around Tesla seems to me to be unfair especially in certain circles.
It's not like the criticism isn't well founded in facts. The decision of forgoing LIDAR (by Musk himself, who called LIDAR a "crutch" [6]) has been debated for years, the constant overpromises and underdeliveries led to a multitude of legal issues and SEC trouble, so did the various other issues surrounding lemon laws, general build quality and spare parts availability that I've linked before. And there's a shocking report of someone claiming to be a Tesla IT insider from 2018 that details very shoddy IT practices [7].
And that's before getting to the Cybertruck which is such a dangerous design that it's deemed unsafe to drive on European roads (with the "workarounds" some people found [8] being under serious questioning) or the completely deranged actions of its leader of the last month.
[1] https://www.carscoops.com/2023/11/tesla-owners-stuck-waiting...
[2] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42709679/tesla-insurance-...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/18yrag1/why_ar...
[4] https://www.dfs.ny.gov/consumers/auto_insurance/difficult-to...
[5] https://tff-forum.de/t/versicherung-fuer-tesla-extrem-teuer/...
[6] https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is...
[7] https://x.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376
[8] https://efahrer.chip.de/news/tesla-fan-sichert-sich-eu-zulas...
We could, but we don't anyway.
Look at the pathetic sentences for driving on drugs or without insurance, etc.
Automation is safer and better.
It's cars that are the problem. Who or what is driving them is a distraction.
Where I live (south germany), for many trips that we can agree are kind of necessary (e.g. daily commute to work), trains can take 4-5x more time. There are other places where it's probably much worse.
There are other reasons why trains are not a replacement, for example cargo. Are you taking home your new cupboard, sofa, or fridge, on a train?
But also the less urban areas... Landshut? Everything well accessible with a bike, get a trailer and you can move around pretty much everything including a Bierbank and a whole ass grill setup - just a day or two ago, someone legitimately posted a photo of themselves, a cargo bike and a full size fridge. During the day, public transit with buses covers even the tiny villages around Landshut, despite the LAVV actually being ranked among the worst public transit systems in Germany.
> Are you taking home your new cupboard, sofa, or fridge, on a train?
For these cases get them delivered and hauled by professionals. That's how my wife and I dealt with our new sofas, IKEA charged something around 100€, or Saturn 40€ for our new dryer - a bargain, compared to having to haul that shit on our own.
I got all of that used either from friends and family, or from kleinanzeigen.de (that's like Craigslist I think). We saved thousands of euros by getting used quality things, instead of new, possibly poor quality, IKEA items. And we did good for sustainability.. But that was only possible by doing spontaneous 5-20km car rides. For the sim-racing rig, driving a bit farther was necessary.
I also went to the hardware store, which is inconvenient to reach by public transport, more than a couple of times.
I don't see how I would have been able to be spontaneous and cheap like that, without a car, or even with a car that wasn't my own.
If you don't have a car, you're going to have a different life. You will make different compromises. You're not going to live in certain places. You're not going to take certain jobs. You might not visit some of your friends and family as often. You might buy new things just because they will be delivered straight to your home (having someone else drive the car).
Of course your life won't end, you might even enjoy it. But you're not _replacing_ the car by a train in many cases. You're just not doing things that you would otherwise do, and some of these will be done, possibly _need_ to be done, by other people instead.
I still take the bike or train when I can, and I like to walk to places within walking distance -- even 30-60 minutes if I have the time. Admittedly, sometimes I take the car instead of public transport only because it's a little bit cheaper or a little more convenient.
I do use city-wide public transport once in a while, but I don't own a monthly public transport ticket because it probably wouldn't pay off since I have a bicycle and a car. A single-trip public transport ticket for 10 minutes is around 3 Euros. If I need to get somewhere quickly (and back) and take the dog (which isn't free), that's closer to 10 Euros. IMO public transport shouldn't advantage the daily users as much in terms of cost (say 60 Euros/month even for people who may use it > 50 times a month), because it prevents adoption.
Yeah, but you don't need your own car for such things. In Landshut for example, there's a car sharing association, and if we would need to go on such a ride we could just rent a car from them, there's always at least five of them available. And on top of that: a move is like what, a once in a decade event?
A car is hundreds of euros a month (the cost of the car itself / depreciation, maintenance, fuel, replacement parts, insurance, rent for a garage plus of course the fuel). It's an incredible waste of money to own a car if all you're realistically using it is once a year for a trip to Italy and once a year to haul some furniture.
The hardcore "car brains" are the worst - so many people who own a car spec it to the demands of their once-a-year vacation trip (and massively overpay as a result) when a cheap Dacia Spring (~17k new) would be more than enough for their daily demands and they could just go and rent a large car for the vacation trip.
Driving like at least 20 times alone would have cost me what, maybe 1000 bucks? Ignoring all the other trouble that makes it less spontaneous.
Also, those cars specifically aren't the right size to transport furniture in the first place. I also can't wear them down like my own car.
> a move is like what, a once in a decade event?
Depends, but there are other situations where you want to move things.
> A car is hundreds of euros a month (the cost of the car itself / depreciation, maintenance, fuel, replacement parts, insurance, rent for a garage plus of course the fuel). It's an incredible waste of money to own a car if all you're realistically using it is once a year for a trip to Italy and once a year to haul some furniture.
Our car is a relatively cheap one, probably 150-200 euros a month all in (about 50 Euros/month for fuel, 50 Euros/month insurance and taxes, about 3500 Euros for buying and maintenance in 3.5 years, you can expect the average cost of ownership here to go down if we hold it for another couple years). Apart from commute (2x/week), we use it 1-2x per week on average. Plus, we can use it for holidays and other trips.
For the basic person-transport needs we could probably use Car Sharing cars if we need it less than 5 times per month (we need it more), but it would be less ergonomic.