Car culture has been complained about almost since its beginning, but just like the horse revolutionized society through the mobility it provided, so too the car has brought similar changes to the behavior of people, and especially among those who valued a bit of space for their own and an escape from high-density neighborhoods full of noisy and nosy neighbors, the problems of sprawl and massive traffic have followed inevitably. Over the past century or so there have been a variety of efforts that idealistic urban planners have undertaken in order to replace cars and eliminate the problems of traffic, and so far these have all been uniformly and inevitably unsuccessful. It is not the purpose of this essay to provide a solution to the problem of cars and their immense popularity–this writer at least does not consider cars to be as large a problem as the coercion that contemporary anti-car advocates wish to use on those of us who appreciate the freedom of travel that personal automobiles bring, and it seems unlikely that the car can be replaced without other forms of travel that offer the same freedom of movement, just like it took something like the car to dethrone the horse as a model of mobility.

For those people who do not wish to eliminate the car outright, but rather accomplish the same aim by stealth and deception, there has been a lot of advocacy of electric cars over the past few years. Unfortunately, the infrastructure and logistics of electric cars don’t make sense as a widespread replacement for gasoline-powered or hybrid models. For one, electric cars themselves are immensely expensive, batteries are not reliable (and are heinously expensive in their own right), and their construction depends on rare materials that involve the exploitation of labor in areas like the Democratic Republic of the Congo or China. Electric cars place immense burdens on the power grid and have a fairly low range in terms of mileage before they require time-consuming charging. In addition to these problems, electric cars are also notoriously temperamental and frequently dangerous, being alarmingly prone to catch on fire when parked inside garages, and prone to start house fires unless the garage is fire-proofed to a high degree. All told, these concerns make electric cars unavailable except to a small virtue-signaling elite that, at least at present, wants to ban the use of other cars in areas under their tyrannical misrule.

Those who wish to replace personal automobiles often seek the recourse of public transportation as a means of encouraging people not to drive on their own. Unfortunately, this does not offer a replacement of the car. Even in European cities that have their own public transportation at levels viewed as superior to that of the United States, this author can attest to the fact that crowded roads and highways full of vehicles in such cities as Barcelona, Malaga, Nice, Paris, and Rome are a real problem. Even when cars, gasoline, and taxis are all expensive, they are still often necessary for transportation, even under the highest density urban planning and the least car-friendly highway systems. And why is this? Again, the issue often boils down to logistics. Traveling via public transportation is often immensely time-consuming and requires a lot of hiking to and from stations and between stations or stops. One has to know where to transfer from one line to another and be able to make such transfers under heavy pressures of time, to be in crowded buses or subway/train cars, with confusing price regimes and without always knowing where to get off most conveniently, which can be a real hassle. In such circumstances, a car can sometimes be necessary, especially when one has mobility concerns that make it impossible to make the long and challenging hikes that are often necessary to have the most efficient and least costly and time-consuming travels. If this is the case even under the best circumstances, it only gets worse when one is in cities where transit options are more limited, routes are more scarce and far less frequent, and where many areas have no public transportation service whatsoever of any kind. Furthermore, adding service and adding routes can be immensely expensive, and most public transportation is not particularly profitable, discouraging investment in making it better, providing a sort of transportation infrastructure catch-22 where public transportation is not convenient enough to replace cars for those who are of a marginal economic position in terms of car ownership, but where not enough people use public transportation to encourage further investment, which might push those marginal car owners into using public transportation instead.

For those people who find electric cars and public transportation too costly and requiring too much capital investment, there is always the temptation to support a simpler life of walking or vehicular traffic. And it must be admitted that at least these options are financially feasible for people, making them superior to the alternatives we have discussed earlier. Still, they are not options that are feasible for very many people. Even in cases where one is dealing with people who are physically fit enough to walk considerable distances (without having to worry about the length of time it requires to get from point A to B) or bicycle longer distances, the worth of doing so is somewhat limited in many cases, unless one is a world-class athlete who wants to be able to brag for decades about being able to bicycle tens or hundreds of miles in the course of a weekend. For most people, at least in the United States, the logistics of walking and bicycling are not very favorable. It takes a lot of walking in most low to mid-density areas to get where one would want to go. Most people do not have locations that they would want to visit that are close enough to be a reasonable walk in a busy life full of work–restaurants within walking distance are scarce, to say nothing of libraries, churches, movie theaters, concert venues, and the like. Traveling via bicycle means that one has to store one’s bicycle in some place and leave it vulnerable to thieves, which are a constant problem in many cities where a lack of respect for the property of others is rampant, and where even a stop inside a restaurant for a meal or going inside to watch a movie can leave one returning to the bike rack (where one can be found) only to find that one’s tire or whole bike has been stolen, leading to immense expense and being stranded unless one can find help from a generous driver. No amount of investment in bike lanes or sidewalks is going to make large scale walking or bicycling feasible for a large number of people in conditions where people do not respect property and where there are not enough places that one can travel to in a short distance and short amount of time.

What are we left with? To be sure, some people can use other means besides cars to get around, because they are willing and able to invest time, money, and muscle power into their transportation and either cannot afford or do not wish to operate motor vehicles. But this does not amount to a large portion of the millions or tens of millions of people who inhabit major metropolitan areas. The ability to work from home would eliminate a great deal of travel. Urban design that encourages mixed use may eliminate other travel, especially for city-dwellers and those with a tolerance for high-density living. Still, we must deal with life as it is, rather than the way we would prefer it. If people have a preference for having living space that they are able to act on, densities will be too low to make much use of mixed-use development or public transportation or easy walking and bicycling distances. If cars are to be replaced in such a world as we live in, they are going to need to be replaced by something at least as effortless and at least as rapid, and offering the same ability to go where one wants when one wants with a minimum of fuss. If anyone has ideas for that, I’m all ears.