Is It Time to Get Rid of Cars?

Is it time to get rid of cars? Think about it for a moment.

Driving is a royal pain in the ass. It's ridiculously expensive and car-owners are milked for every last penny from both government and private business.

Also, it's incredibly dangerous; car accidents make up the fourth most common cause of death around the world. And it's frustrating that the government hands a license to pretty much every who applies and you get some of the biggest douches behind the wheel everywhere you go!

And let us not forget that it's horrible for the environment, with nearly half of all greenhouse gas emissions coming from the ONE BILLION motor vehicles that are on our roads around the world.

Cars need to be eliminated from our economic and cultural makeup and replaced with efficient, clean, automated and affordable public transit.

A Brief Look At How We Got Here

Cars and highways and driver licenses and auto insurance are relatively new to the world. The roads of America didn't start to fill up with cars until just before the Second World War. During the twenties, it wasn't uncommon to see people getting around by horse. Just over a hundred years ago nobody had a car! 

In fact, it wasn't until the end of the Cold War and the economic globalization boom that millions of cars started hitting the road in countries all over the world. In 1990, the end of the Cold War, there were just under 200 million vehicles on the road in the world. A mere thirty years later, in 2010, there were ONE BILLION!!!

When you place the last thirty years against the backdrop of 100,000 years of human history, we've only had this car phenomenon for 0.0003% of our history. Cars are not something historic, and their unsustainability means they won't be a permanent feature of human civilization either. Getting rid of most of the cars in the world is an inevitable part of our future.

How Would A World Without Cars Look?

How can people get around? Well, public transit, especially in North America, needs to improve by leaps and bounds. Bus routes need to be better thought out and allow a person to connect to any other point in the city with ease. Bus schedules should ensure a wait of no longer than 15 minutes between buses during the day, and buses should run all night on a reduced schedule.

The existing gigantic multi-lane highways need to become high-speed electric rail corridors. Most of the lanes can be removed and nature can be allowed to reclaim the land. A few lanes need to remain for the few vehicles that will need to use the highways.

The trains themselves need to be modern, clean and very comfortable. They should be fast and connect every city in a region to every other city. Their schedules should be convenient and it shouldn't take more than an hour to get to work for commuters. For long-distance travel, regular diesel trains can do the trip.

Services & deliveries

What about hauling furniture, or tradespeople needing to transport heavy machinery, or farmers needing to haul supplies? These people will fall into a special category of license that will allow them to own and operate a pickup truck or van. Their licensing will be regulated and they must attend training first. Having large metallic objects hurtling down roads in excess of 100 km/h SHOULD require extensive training and regulation!

Everyone else, the office workers, the wage slaves, the lawyers and the rich, will need to make do with public transit.

Public Transit is Key

The key to all of this is having affordable public transit. The government will need to heavily subsidize the fares, and make no mistake that these need to be government operations. The poorest person needs to be able to afford to get to work, so the price gouging for public transit needs to end.

Here's How We Do It

Before cars are completely fazed out, the public transit infrastructure needs to be built and people need to get used to taking it. There's no point eliminating cars and then not having sufficient public transit for people; that's something only an idiot politician would do. 

Instead, the entire public transit system needs to be in place, then, stop renewing licenses or giving new ones, and slowly the world's dependence on cars will decrease and then die out completely.

The environmental impact

Once cars are gone from society, several things will start to happen. First, and most obviously, the danger to life and limb will plummet significantly. 

According to the Insurance Institute of North America, 938 children under 12 years of age, including 204 toddlers and infants, were killed in 2015 by vehicles in Canada and the US. 45% of those were pedestrian deaths. 

This is what happens when you have too many unqualified people driving huge vehicles at high speeds all over the city. Eliminating vehicles will eliminate the danger to people, especially children.

When there are only a few cars left on the road, carbon levels will come down. The planet can start to cleanse itself from 70 years of horrible pollution spewing into the air. As the need for fossil fuels drops off, there will be fewer tankers on the oceans, fewer pipelines across the land, and far fewer environmental disasters caused by our insatiable need for oil.

The economic impact

A lot of industries will shut down, that's for certain, and a lot of people will be impacted. Entire economies will be shaken to their core. These industries didn't exist a hundred years ago, and because the current economic dependence on motor vehicles cannot continue, regardless of how much we want it to, these industries won't exist a hundred years in the future, either. 

Something new will fill the void, and a minimum income coupled with a federal jobs guarantee and free retraining will support those whose livelihoods are negatively impacted.

Are You Ready?

Look, it's only a matter of time before the entire auto industry shifts dramatically, whether it be to electric vehicles or simply dies out. Because of the danger involved in having barely-qualified people behind the wheel, I vote for the phasing them out completely.

Cars have brought us great freedom and convenience, but it's time that they are relegated to the history books.