I’m getting a lot of ‘but my car is more convenient’ arguments lately, and I’m struggling to convey why that doesn’t make sense.
Specifically how to explain to people that: Sure, if you are able to drive, and can afford it, and your city is designed to, and subsidizes making it easy to drive and park, then it’s convenient. But if everyone does it then it quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons situation.
I thought of one analogy that is: It would be ‘more convenient’ if I just threw my trash out the window, but if we all started doing that then we’d quickly end up in a mess.
But I feel like that doesn’t quite get at the essence of it. Any other ideas?
Re: commuting:
The average commute in the US is about 32 km, a distance decently doable by regional train.
However, if we include daily errands, the median distance of any trip is about 6 or 7 km, a distance perfectly manageably by bicycle.
Back to the national scale, it takes a lot of suspension of critical thought to insist that the USA is too big for a nationwide railway network, while never blinking an eye at the fact that a nationwide highway network does exist, despite highways being more expensive to maintain, more energy-intensive to use, slower, harder to electrify & more dependent on specific energy resources, offering much worse capacity in both number of people and tonnes of freight, and uniquely getting worse in experience if/when upgraded to address induced demand.