>that’s where most people alive, and in the not too distant future, the vast majority.

Ironically enough, Covid is showing just how much people would rather not choose that destiny. In the US, inner city real estate has taken a hit while car-only rural/Exurbs property has seen a dramatic uptick. I take this to mean that, A. many people would like get away from the filth/homelessness/noise city, and B. many people would like to have space for creative activities that our litigious and ownership driven society deems only appropriate for private ownership. Space that makes urban landscapes take on “non-human scales” is just part of that equation. No way for everyone that wants one to have space for a nice garden, a gym or a painting studio or whatever in the confines of a city, ergo suburbs. As automation frees our time people are going to desire more space for creative activities not less. Having grown up in a more rural setting, you learn how to use the space afforded to you. Things like having a band, making/fixing things, keeping animals, growing plants, experimenting or really any physical project or collection, all require a considerable amount of space.

Which brings me to my next point, people choose to live in the city because it is convenient in our society, not by some law of attraction. Short of climate change laying waste to the environment, I expect people to actually move away from dense urban living long-term as automation becomes more dominant. Personally, I enjoy living in the city because it is convenient and I don’t partake in a lot of the activities that drive people toward wanting space, and honestly like the people I find there better, but find every city I’ve ever been to be extremely loud, absolutely filthy, and ugly as hell–architecture is only beautiful in contrast with how ugly the urban setting is. Amazon delivery alone has made rural life much more attractive.

And besides all this, there’s still the problem that the vast majority of the New World just isn’t as settled as the Old. While Europe was adapting cities to the modern era of transportation, we were bootstrapping a country into existence.
You say, “our society has gone too far”, but out here in California, by modern society’s standards, we would need several lifetimes of radical change in order to come anywhere near such a goal through traditional means(e.g. public transit, dense urban housing). You are accurate in your appraisal that our cities are often designed around the car, but you can’t just wave a magic wand and fix the massive structural housing problems and lack of mass transit infrastructure. And this isn’t the 1970’s, infrastructure construction takes FOREVER and is ludicrously expensive, especially major infrastructure that will see lots of public use. Don’t forget about our stringent wildlife/environmental/worker protections, and accessibility/fire codes to further complicate, slow and add expense(not to say that these are universally bad). Moreover the state has spent the better part of the last 100 years actively fighting urbanization. Currently the average commute in California is 30 mins/20 miles each way[1], apparently twice that of Europe[2]. California also has 40 million people most of whom commute by car and an entrenched political establishment. To illustrate these points: San Francisco is working on adding an extension to its metro, a 1.7 mile addition with 4 stations, albeit a deep cut going through downtown, will take a decade to construct and will cost $1.5B, it’s expected to service 35k people per day(which, having lived along the proposed line for 2 years recently, seems awful high). Meanwhile all of the state’s urban centers and especially SF are compromised of legions of office buildings with only a smattering of apartment buildings. Instead of building up in the Bay Area, we paved over Antioch, some of the best farmland in the world, with ideal conditions for the difficult to grow Almond crop, to put in suburbs some 45 miles away from the City, and only decades later finally got around to running a single rail line out there. Meanwhile, we created a giant waterway to move some of the fresh water that flowed through that area 250 miles south to the desert so that we can grow almonds there instead. We did that right away, and the state is now planning on building a new pipeline and pumping station because the original waterway was allegedly causing environmental problems. I take the skeptical tone because they’ve never actually said that they plan to stop using the old waterway, only that it has problems that the new one won’t have. My point here being that a supposedly progressive state like California is ideologically incredibly far away from even considering moving away from the car. Meanwhile, another real human tragedy that we may be able to fix relatively quickly—that is 10’s of millions of people wasting ~250 hours a year driving a car to work, most likely in traffic. I see it as a great Good if we can automate driving to free up all that time, and setting the conversation up around a goal of 0 fatalities is incredibly callous of that cost of human life.

I’ve both been poor in the US and known and talked to many many poor people here. Car ownership is absolutely empowering, because while you see it as an unnecessary expense, most see it as a valuable tool. And a car is cheap if you consider it housing. It’s really difficult to compare being impoverished in the US vs Europe because of how little social safety net we give people here. All else being equal though, I’d rather be poor and be “burdened” by car ownership than live in a society that bars me from affording one as a poor person. In the former situation Im at least able to freely move to a more suitable location. A few key things a car provides: A car is a mobile comfort zone. Sick of your partner’s family(or your own?) or not feeling the office for lunch? sitting out in your car is way more peaceful than sitting on the curb. A car is also a mobile lock-box. Going grocery shopping? Pretty handy to be able to go to multiple stores on the same trip, not everyone likes making a trip to the store on the way home for a couple of things everyday. It’s also useful if you are poor to not be beholden to local prices, traveling a bit offers you the ability to shop around for deals. It’s also handy to have things with you(food and drink, cosmetics, clothes, tools)as in general when you are poor you can’t afford to make convenient purchases and generally need to be more prepared to strike at opportunity. Car ownership offers all kinds capabilities for odd jobs as well, now formalized with the gig-economy. Also, having had both a car and a bike in downtown SF, e-devices are not an alternative to cars, they are an alternative to a bike. I could mostly replace owning a bike with the rentals, not having to think about theft is nice. But a car operates in any conditions and lets me do a proper (Costco)grocery run, buy large things, buy things not available locally (Craigslist), deal with bed bugs(seriously saved our ass having a car there), go to nature, travel with a pet, and visit and transport friends and family.

Anyway thanks for the link about vision zero. I just fundamentally disagree with their core principle, ‘life and health can never be exchanged for other benefits within the society.’ —that’s literally what society is about, we exchange our life in the form of work for other benefits in the form of money. While I think this is a fine ideal, and I do believe that we should strive to raise the value of life above a dollar value, I certainly do on a personal level, I also think that we still live in a world of harsh limitations and that we should be conscious of the effect we have of those who we take from when we try to protect others. I found the traffic calming in London unthinkable and terrible, purposefully making the lives of every motorist miserable to decrease the risk of accidents seems like a Faustian bargain to me. You trade a shared social risk of injury for the guarantee of making a bunch of peoples lives harder, because if you make it sufficiently hard enough hopefully less people die. Even knowing my way around SF, driving around downtown with its traffic calming is a nightmare and easily one of the most high stress, anger inducing things I did when I lived there. Reading through visionzero’s policy agenda and action plan for SF feels so out of touch with the realities of driving in it. I did learn why the lights are such a mess in downtown though, unlike in most areas where they time the lights for motorists to go a certain speed, in SF they time them for pedestrians. This makes me extremely skeptical of the whole program, lights that aren’t timed for a speed limit drastically increase motorist propensity to speed in order to beat the next light. Taking a harder look at visionzero, I don’t see anything that informs their policy initiatives, and they actively state that “How data is used to communicate and evaluate progress toward goals should reflect the values of the overall strategy.” So I really don’t see why they are worth listening too, they don’t ever provide any sort of cross analysis either. No mention of how construction effects traffic in their 2019 SF report that I could see, ludicrous. No mentioning road rage or driver sentiment ever. Some moral crusade, lol. It seems more like it’s really some rich persons sick vision of zero cars, and the plan is to legislate torture into the driving experience to do it. Freedom of movement isn’t something poors should have.

[1] https://www.answerfinancial.com/insurance-center/which-state...

[2] https://www.sdworx.com/en/press/2018/2018-09-20-more-than-20...