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?
It’s on a case-to-case basis and depends on the location and lifestyle of the person. I live in a city with a downtown area that is inconvenient for cars because of the scarcity of parking. So from that perspective, driving is actually more inconvenient than taking a bus or hailing a ride-share. On the other hand, there is little to no public transit outside of the downtown area, so having a car is more convenient (rather, a necessity) in that case.
I think this makes a lot of sense, at least in the US where we have a mix of super dense population centers for which mass transit is the only sane option, but also very very rural areas where mass transit just isn’t viable. Find your parking along the edge of the walkable area and take the mass transit to the walkable portion. The big city near me has at least somewhat embraced this and converted a couple of the big streets into ‘no cars allowed’ and it’s made for some good places, and I can go there from further away thanks to parking and taking a bus in. I could go for some more pedestrian bridges and maybe some trams rather than the bus, but at least I see the hint of a scenario where things can come together.