this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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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.