I don't own a car. I take public transit everywhere, and I do think personal vehicle use has real environmental costs. But I don't think driving is inherently unethical.

I live in Seoul, and the city makes transit easy for me. That's not a virtue. It's a condition I happen to benefit from. Some people live where transit barely exists, or where it doesn't get them to work, school, or care. In those places, driving is not optional.

The same is true of flying. In parts of Europe you can cross borders by train. In island nations, or in places with weak land connections, flying may be the only realistic option. “Just fly less” means very different things in those places.

A lot of what gets called my ethical choices comes from the conditions I live in. That makes me wary of turning structural failures into personal morality. If the alternative is missing or unusable, shaming people for not choosing it solves nothing.

When environmental harm gets framed as individual moral failure, attention shifts away from the structural changes that would actually matter. It's not an accident that oil companies spent decades popularizing the idea of the personal carbon footprint.

@hongminhee I have lived in many different situations and this can't be truer.

Sometimes I was in such a small town I had to take the car to buy bread.

Sometimes I only take the car to do long trips to badly connected cities.

Do I use the car as less as possible? Yes.

Do I still own a car because it is a need on my situation? Also yes.

"But you could rent a car and not own it" environmentally it would be the same. And more expensive to me.

@hongminhee

San Jose's local public transit is infamously bad. Getting more than like 10 miles by bus can take 3-5 times longer than just driving. And there isn't any room to build a comprehensive metro network, we simply have some of the worst light rail in the entire US.

@hongminhee thanks for this post, as it shows that similar thoughts are thought all over the world and there are similar situations. In Germany @SheDrivesMobility is fighting for a change regarding the usage/options of public transport in thinner populated areas, as our mobility has to change. In his book „The Ministry for the Future“ the author proposed blimps for air travel and solar sail powered ships for overseas travel. We are not yet there, unfortunately.

@hongminhee nicely said, and I agree. (Also, I was lucky to use Chinese trains and Seoul subway fall 2024! I want more time in Seoul...I thought I would need my daughter to translate, but I found it easy to go places alone.)

@hongminhee Cosign

@hongminhee - 100% agree with this, change comes from a mix of personal decisions and addressing systemic failures, and what's ethically right will be dependent on circumstances. I guess the only universal ethical factor is that everyone should do as much as they reasonably can to enact positive change.

In any case, systems are the collective behaviour of individuals, so systemic change still starts with individual action, just of a different kind.

@hongminhee

The "unethical" is on the part of city designers, counties, cities, states, and countries that incentivize building for cars instead of for buses, trains, and bikes.

@hongminhee it's not a problem of personal choice, it's the design of policy we created leading to that personal choice.

@hongminhee

It's both personal and environmental.

@hongminhee
Very much agree.
I live in rural Scotland where transport links are less than patchy, and having a car is a necessity. Our car is electric, thankfully, but but we have to have it or I can't get to and from work. There isn't a public transport alternative that gets me there on time!

@hongminhee exactly.

I think flying is excessively demonised. It accounts for less than 2% of emissions. It's like 10% of surface transport. But by going after flying a certain class of eco people can look down both on those who drive up to the private jet terminal in a giant range over, and the people who are going 3 hours away for their one 2 weeks holiday of the year. Without actually tackling any of the far bigger sources of emissions

I wish there was more campaigning for public transport

@hongminhee yep.

Here, in Atlanta, public transit is so limited that you have to drive most of the distance you want to travel, just to get to the train system.

@hongminhee While I do agree with you in principle, I also think that certain personal choices can have a long tail of consequences that can be avoided. I find it good and necessary to make driving in places with good public transit very inconvenient. I do find it necessary to make local populations fight for more transit in more places. So it's not as simple as "countryside = driving". Why not increase living density wherever possible, so that transit and other sustainable options are possible?

@hongminhee I like how France is coupling it to rules. "If a destination can be reached by train below 2h (or similar it was) then a plane route there can be removed."

If we would turn all of this into similar logical rules the of course you would just not apply them to say... the canaries.

@hongminhee EXACTLY ALL OF THIS!

For me getting to a doctor - depending on severity - would mean walking a kilometer, taking a bus or worst case an ambulance.

For someone in the Maldives, it may be hours if not days on a boat or an air taxi.

@hongminhee brilliantly written!

@hongminhee One the one hand, yes. On the other hand, in many countries car owners are the biggest obstacle to reducing car usage because they tend to view minor inconvenience (e.g. one lane less, or a bit less parking) as equivalent to death threats.

@hongminhee

When environmental harm gets framed as individual moral failure, attention shifts away from the structural changes that would actually matter.

Thank you for a very lucid post, you sum up the situation many people are in fairly.

We can not all live in citys or the majority of for example food production would stop.

@hongminhee
Yes, but also it looks like folks in my city will successfully kill a plan to build a center lane bus solution. That's a car centric choice they are making, in the middle of a world wide fossil fuel crisis.

@hongminhee

Oh, this is true. The question to be asking is why those structural conditions exist.

In the case of islands, that’s physical reality. In the case of car centric design, that’s an urban planning choice and development choice that harms people.

The focus is less on them choosing the options they have, to focus on changing what those options are

@hongminhee I watch Mr Ha's channel from Korea (he runs the fish farm and befriended and tamed 3 different families of feral cats, building them a giant catio where they all live together) and wherever he is (its never shown in the videos) is remote enough that you definitely need some kind of vehicle to get around (even just on his farm which appears to be several km across but he also builds his own small electric vehicles for this purpose)

@hongminhee

Thankful to see this post.

I live in a rural area. There are no buses, no trains, no carpools. We try to consolidate our trips out as best we can but there's only so much we can do.

I've straight up seen people suggest that people living in rural places were unethical - fully disconnected from the fact that this is where their food comes from.

Not everything can get concentrated into cities and not all of us want that life. Rural public transport is possible but lacking.

@hongminhee All true, AND, each person needs to make some effort.

@hongminhee The level of implied impending doom is absolutely delightful. LoL

@hongminhee 1000% agree. I think these personal choices are valuable when someone is feeling helpless. It can make a difference! If someone feels better having changed their habits, that is great and the carbon saved is great too. But I would never ever use them as a cudgel to shame someone. That’s completely misplacing the responsibility in my opinion.

The systems need to change. When we think of our roles it must be more about how we pressure the systems (voting, joining orgs we align with, pressuring reps) than about our tiny imprint we can make within the system.

@hongminhee Kia and Hyundais cars, especially EVs, popular in UK.

@hongminhee

I disagree with a few crucial points. !stly, it's no coincidence that people refuse to accept their own responsibility by pretending it's the fault of fossil fuel extremists.
That's more often than not a lazy, convenient excuse. And no, I'm *not* per se blaming people living in rural areas.

2ndly, there's much more GHG/environmentally harmful than mobility, and people are 100% responsible for these lifestyle choices, e.g. compare SK's meat consumption in the 1960s vs today.

@hongminhee
It's the dose that makes the poison, is a saying in Germany and in my opinion that fits good for the things you pointed out.

Driving and flying isn't the problem but how it's done, regarding to the technology that's used to do it, to this day a very pollution heavy one but there are cleaner alternatives that work as well.

Like you already mentioned, it's a structural problem and not a individual moral failure. 😉

(Added some hashtags for better visibility in the Fediverse, feel free to use them in your own post.)
#Transportation #PublicTransport #Public #Transit #Car #Plane #Driving #Flying #City
@bestiaexmachina

@hongminhee

For ne, the question is how many externalities am I willing to impose on future generations. What share of the worlds CO2 emissions am I willing to be personally responsible for due to my decisions?

What proportion of the planets non-renewable resources am I willing to consume? How many earths would it take to maintain my lifestyle, and who pays the consequences - my grandkids in 50 years, or the global south?

@hongminhee As a resident of Hawaii Island in an area with little public transportation, thank you. When I lived in San Francisco, I mostly got around on public transit. Not an option yet. But I drive an electric vehicle and do what I can.

@hongminhee same thing w plastic recycling. its available in my current municipality, but who knows if what i put into the recycling bin actually gets recycled. in my hometown, their recycling program only ran for 5 years because the city cldnt sell their trash anymore.

@hongminhee Bravo, excellently put.

@hongminhee I don't own a car or a driver's license. I live downtown, so I walk, run, and take public transit everywhere. And I agree 100%. It's like you said, our choices depend on what's available where we live. Blaming people for these choices lets the real problems go unfixed. Who am I to judge others?

@hongminhee

Public transport to get to/from employment is fine, if one say works in an office, a school etc, you turn up and stay in the same place all day. However if you work somewhere and need to visit clients, you need to get to them, and public transport does not go everywhere, this is the case if you work as a care worker, solicitor and other jobs.

@hongminhee So much this. Even while there's a moral dimension, it's not black and white, and the system of washing harms as 'personal responsibility' when people who reinforce the systems have names and addresses is not good at all.

@hongminhee I also don't own a car, I took a conscious choice to pick an area with good public transport before moving in... On the other hand I live in Ireland and yeah, it's either plane or ferry to get anywhere. I wish I could use trains.

@hongminhee Driving might not be optional for some people, but the normalised way of driving actually prevents others from, for example, taking a bike.

Taking a bike medium distances used to be a normal activity in many parts of the world where it's now dangerous because of people driving their cars too fast, too close, and too much.

If a car driver consider bikes and pedestrians annoyances that are "in the way" on a country road, the driver is forcing car culture on them.

@hongminhee The first ten words just made me hear Sham 69.

«I don't need a flash car to take me around
I can get the bus to the other side of town»

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JEsN3YFz-Kg

#Sham69

@hongminhee
Seoul was great to live in, from a no-car perspective, even twenty years ago! It wasn't just the public transit either. I lived at the top of a hill, and people would come up our road selling heavy things like watermelons from their truck, so that customers didn't have to carry it all the way home by foot. The population density is what made that possible, I suppose.

@hongminhee If it is true what I read days ago, that the tiny percentage of billionaires flights accounts for 50% of planes emissions, it is so clear who should fly less. And why they won't.

@hongminhee

First rate post. Thank you for taking the time to build this so well, for making the insight, for formulating it into a message, and for making the message respectful.

Ta.

@hongminhee Man... I hate everything written here. I just wished there was public transit where I lived to where I work existed. My work requires me to drive to get from point A to B. With that being said, the public transit I do have access to isn't half bad. Finding work close to me seems less than ideal, but if something does come about, I'd happily use it here in order to use my car less. I like this way of thinking. Thank you very much random internet person.

@hongminhee So many people are forced into owning a car to get anywhere. Americans especially, in cities that only work for car owners. I'm lucky to live with plenty of transit options, in a relatively small European city I can cycle and walk around pretty easily (however much they tried to ruin it back in the 60s.) And it's well connected to the UK's national rail network. I can access many shops and services in my neighborhood. So I've got the option of being car free. So many don't.

@hongminhee not sure tarnishing carbon footprint reporting as the "oil company choice" is particularly helpful. People do have agency - to varying degree (e.g., nobody obliges people to buy supersized US SUV's, fly private jets etc.). And producer based accounting is anyway what drives NDC's.

The moral angle of sustainability is imho a quagmire that we barely started unravel. E.g. people feel "normal" to inherit financial assets, how about inheriting also family environmental liabities? 🤔

@hongminhee Kind of except that living In Seoul is a choice and the city transportation system is an emergent property of the behavior of the people in the city.
In a democracy, structural failures are kind of moral failings - the decision to make places inaccessible to people with disabilities, that it's better for kids to get asthma and old people get dementia than to pay the taxes for a good transportation system are moral choices.