Another "end of the Car" prediction
 

From Autoweek today:

Curious what everyone's thoughts are to these types of predictions about the end of the era of cars. It seems like people have been saying this forever, yet people rely on cars as much as before.

Very interesting read. I don't know what to think of that as it's as much a part of our culture as anything. We use our cars so much that it's a part of us and who we are. Other cultures have relied on public transportation for so long that in the same way, it's a part of who they are. It would be a huge culture shock to us to HAVE to use public transportation for travel instead of hopping in our car and taking off.

Cars, especially for Americans, are a huge status symbol as well. We often times relate a nice car to having money and public transportation would ruin that for many (not me as I don't have money).

It's a very interesting time to be living in right now. Gonna be neat to see what happens in the years to come.

Lol, people in New York take public transportation because they have no choice. If traffic in Manhattan wasn't so bad (due to taxis), people would be driving to work instead of taking the subway. I doubt anyone in New York willingly takes the MTA and is happy with the service. The subways are overcrowded, they smell, it's always late, the prices seem to rise every year, and it's always boiling hot in the subway stations.

I live in NYC and I personally drive every day to work. If I took public transportation I would have to wake up an hour or two earlier just to get to work on time. My company has 8 offices located throughout the borough of Brooklyn and I get sent to a different office almost every week and I still drive regardless of what part of Brooklyn it's in.

So I would disagree with that article. Cars would never fade because people like us on this forum would try our hardest to keep them around.

Cars may (probably will) fade in heavily dense urban areas (Like Tokyo, N.Y.C., L.A., London, etc.), but completely from existance? Nope, not gonna happen.

What moron in the rural areas is going to leave their house at 4 am in the morning to reach a bus stop 6 miles down the road, to catch a bus to take him 20 miles into town? No one. Not in the U.S., not in Europe, not in Asia, not...anywhere!

This writer is greatly over-generalizing when he says 'cars'. I think we can all agree that the days of the internal gasoline combustion engine are becoming numbered, but that doesn't mean cars leave for good. It just means their current hearts will be replaced with something that doesn't use up a non-renewable source of energy (I personally like Hyrdogen cells). I think this guy needs to get out into the country (sounds like he goes from one huge City to the next) and see just how amazingly hard it would be to get anywhere without a car, let alone make any form of Public transportation both reliable and convienent out in the middle of bum-fuck no where.

I also would have to disagree that gasoline diasappears for good, however. 50-60 years from now, when cars are running on god knows what, you'll still be able to get gasoline for your first true love, it'll just be god awful expensive because, in the world economy, if demand goes down, so too does supply. WOweee! Economics 101!

Anywho, guys a moron, or just writing something that'll get attention and get more people to read his article so he can boast about how his writing brings in more readers, or something, I unno.

The only thing I agree with is that we should enjoy these last decades of our roaring, responsive gasoline engines, and hope to God that some brilliant engineer finds a way to make cars run on something we'll never run out of, that doesn't smog air (I say smog, not create global warming. Take your political scam elsewhere) around us, but can still make us go 0-60 in under 6 seconds.

Cheers.

Come to Australia and try and live without a car... We have the same landmass as the USA and less than 1/10th the population.

Things are rather 'spread out'

But hey, if Mr. Attention Seeking journalist wants to catch the bus... Good luck to him :)

4:00 AM?

I live in a rural area and often ride the bus. I (and most passengers) walk to the bus stop, but a couple passengers drive from their homes to the stop; they leave their houses at 8:00 and drive 10 minutes to the stop.

Riding the bus is not that bad. I save on parking fees/gas and the buses are fare-free, have onboard internet, and there is a website that shows where the buses are. Passengers are friendly and we chat on the way in. I also bring my laptop so I can browse the web, watch movies, or get work done.

On the other hand, I love to drive and it takes less time.

On days when I'm in running late or have stuff to do after work, I drive to work; otherwise I take the bus.

Doing both provides some perspective: Riding the buses makes me appreciate the fun, flexibility, speed, and independence of cars even more (while if I drove in 5 days a week it would seem like a grind). And when I drive in, being stuck in traffic makes me appreciate that if it weren't for the buses, there'd be a lot more cars on the road (and traffic would be even worse).

What anti-mass transit lobbyist wrote that?

It's not the end of the car... maybe the end of petrol guzzlers, but hardly the end of personal transporation.

A more accurate term might be "climate change."

I may regret asking this, but just out of curiosity, what are your thoughts regarding the validity of the natural selection theory of evolution...?

:laughabove:

That was the stupidest thing I've read for quite a long time now.


What kind of idiot wrote this and expected for someone else to agree?

:bs:

In New Zealand, everyone has a car! or two. cheap jap imports!!!!!
$1200 for my first car!

For enthusiasts like us, the car - as we know and love it - is a dying breed. But just performance cars. Never mind the environment, the government regulations and efficiency standards are gonna kill off the fastest and "funnest" cars out there.

But we'll be driving "cars" for a long long time... they'll just be small and boxy, and motivated by technology much less exciting.

On the bright side, one way to move forward is going back to the basics of "doing mroe with less." Smaller and more efficient engines pushing/pulling a lighter chassis. Like the FT86, for example.

The Subaru 216A is excessive and therefore, doomed.






















































lol.

i've lived in LA most of my life and i've spent considerable time in tokyo, and let me tell you, you start to appreciate the mass transit over there really fast. tolls for all the highways are mad expensive, there is no parking anywhere, and the streets are full of car, bicycle and pedestrian traffic. driving in japan isn't fun unless you get away from the city and out to the touge, or take the expressway in the middle of the night when it's actually flowing.

i'd love to see tokyo style mass transit in LA (but i'm sure they'd mess it up and make it like NYC), but no matter what this guy says it just ain't happening anytime soon. the detroit big 3 bought up light rail companies back in the day and eliminated them, and made deals with large cities to make them plan their communities around auto transportation. tokyo or nyc subways, trains and buses just don't work in LA, the city just isn't dense enough. you have to walk way too far from your house to the nearest bus station, and the distance from the bus station to the closest train station is way too far. in order to shorten that distance, you'd have to put stations and lines everywhere, but there would be far too few people using each of those stations to justify the cost because the population density just is not there. this guy's prediction may be right but it's gonna take multiple decades in LA.

Even with mass transit in NYC, a good chunk of people don't use it. Theres certain parts of NYC you can't reach by mass transit. His prediction wouldn't work in NYC even with the large population we have.

This is the NYC subway map:
http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/nyct/maps/submap.htm

You notice that all the subway lines from Brooklyn to Queens run through Manhattan first, when you could just use the highway system from Brooklyn right into Queens without crossing any bridges. Mass transit is just too big of a hassle here for certain situations.
The subways don't even go to certain parts of East Brooklyn.

I knew my comment would get a nibble. I should have clarified, actually, that by global warming I meant all the political-hoo-ah that goes with it. Quite honestly I think that if there were some undisputable, solid, clear evidence that we, as humans, were about to destroy the planet and send it to become the next Venus, drastic measures would have been taken by the Global community by now. Apparently small changes to pollution laws are good enough, at least for now, for these doomsayers, and apparently the fact that the two largest nations (population wise) are becoming modern Industrial economies more and more by the day, is also of little concern. Ergo, for the time being, its hog-wash. Its a contradiction in that light. Makes absolutely no sense from a logic standpoint.

Natural selection? Probably hog-wash as well. Look how many morons still roam these wild lands.:bellyroll: Though thats probably an ironic answer of me to come up with in your eyes.

Thats awesome that you have some sort of public transit like that out in the middle of no where. Where I'm from, in the massive corn-clad lands of northern indiana, there is no such thing.