this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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A small nuance is that car sharing is usually better than taxis. A taxi is driving around empty around half the time and has an average occupancy below 1.0. With car share, all the mileage involves moving people to places
I think that's a regional dependant one in terms of which should be prioritized. There a lot of factors that could lean on way or another.
For example, while Taxis drive around empty, car shares sit around empty. That's a geometry problem that will be different city to city.
Also, car shares only allow people who can drive (and their passengers) to travel. Taxis can take anyone.
A private car typically sits empty and unused 95% of the time, with all its embodied energy and materials, blocking up 10 square meters of street that might otherwise contain sidewalk or trees.
Thought experiment. Imagine a city where all the car owners sold their cars and took taxis instead. I'm pretty sure this has been modeled and the result is always a massive improvement in terms of resources and space.
Fair comment. On my fantasy mayoral system there'd be no storing cars on public land, so the space issue might be moot
That's my fantasy too. And I understand it's roughly the situation in Japan, where urban streets generally do not have parked cars (or sidewalks, alas). It's because cars are understood to be just another form of private property, to be stored privately. After all, even in the West you don't just leave your property in a public place, for some reasons it's only cars. A mind-blowing framing of the problem.