What would happen if all personal vehicles were outlawed?

First nit pick on your question: What about bicycles?

If no bikes, then you make it difficult to do much in the way of shopping or moving things. When I take the train to work, I limit whatever shopping I might do because of the difficulty in carrying more than a bag or two.

One won’t be going to Home Depot to get a bunch of stuff to fix up one’s home or garden.

And, you make it very hard for a family to have a day at the beach.

I’d move to another country. Devil take the hindmost.

I agree with @NoMore time to move to a different country.

I guess we would have to have a service for all our shopping needs like Amazon to deliver what we need.

This never could happen unless focused to a very specific location. People live in areas where there is simply zero public transportation and never will be. Thus no business, no jobs.
What is the goal of this?

I’d become an Uber driver, accepting just wife, kid, and myself as a client.

Climate change making living with pollution from oil unattainable. The dismal future if we don’t do something soon.

They can try to pass an authoritarian law like that but it’ll end in a violent revolution.

I know the question is hypothetical but with the oil companies as big and powerful as they are it would never happen.
Plus what about people that live in rural areas, where there is no mass transit,are they expected to move into the large cities?
As a planet we are going to have to shift away from fossil fuel, more research has to go into alternative fuels, such as solar, and electric, or even hydrogen.
But to say personal vehicles outlawed,people need to get from AtoB and can’t always rely on public transit.

~Then only criminals will have cars.

I’m sure this would never happen but I do believe we are running out of time and we are all gonna have a rough future which is coming up fast.

Kiss personal freedom goodbye.
The government would have to take over everything.
There would only be two classes: The working poor and the ruling elite.

Only outlaws would have personal vehicles. And there would be a lot of them.
There are people here who don’t even want to convert to vehicles that use less gas. (They can take my gas guzzling SUV from my cold dead fingers!”)

@gondwanalon isn’t that now?
The working poor and the ruling elite?

I like to travel my state and explore all its parks and campgrounds so that would suck. Can I have a horse for camping? No public transport will get me to where I want to go. Some state parks are a 4–5 hour drive by car to the middle of woods and forests.

I could easily handle it in my daily life. I already live downtown and near my work. I walk everywhere. Our house is also right on a bus route.

I feel like you’re asking multiple different questions here. Are we banning fossil fuels or ALL personal transportation? If the latter, you’re going to crash society because anyone who doesn’t live in a population dense area now can’t get the to store or work. And yes, farms are affected, but so is mining and fishing and… really EVERYTHING. The lack of goods being generated out of low pop density areas would then lead to shortages in cities and probably food riots.

I mean, you’ve removed one of the lynchpins of society.

You would have to pry the handlebars from my cold, dead hands.

@SQUEEKY2 Are you joking?
I think that the USA is heading in that direction. Thankfully we still have a large bourgeoisie class. Not likely for much longer.

@Entropy I don’t think we can maintain this form of society forever. We will run out of fossil fuels and/or destroy this planet in the not to distant future. Climate change is a thing and it’s happening, we are running out of time.

@Dig_Dug I have often wished humanity had not gone down the path of automobiles. I think it has really destroyed much that is good in the world but I don’t see it ever happening. We can’t even get sensible gun control passed.

@janbb I just left a comment to wulfie that he may not like on my other thread about the three kids that were killed. We have to do something or we are all gonna pay for this destroying the planet and ourselves with these guns.

I’m thinking about a society that didn’t have automobiles, which would also not have planes, @janbb.. I think it would be very much like “Little House on the Prairie.” Large quantities of anything would need to be shipped by rail, as it wouldn’t be practical for something large (refrigerator, washing machine) to be shipped long distances by horse. Even to ship something large from a railway depot to someone’s house would be an effort. Maybe the alternative would be more local factories doing more local selling.

@jca2 Oh – there’s no turning back at this point so I won’t even speculate. But if I had a time machine, I would not have automobiles or highways.

@janbb I think it’s fun to speculate! There would be good and bad of course, and many things that would be hard to predict (as during the pandemic, there were things that we never would have predicted like the pandemic’s effect on the job market).

Stay tuned.

If the intention is preventing use if fossil fuels, this wouldn’t get it done. People would start using more electricity, and most of that is the product of coal plants.
Yes. Hypothetically, we could make everything solar, wind, tidal, hydrogen, nuclear, whatever powered. But, that won’t happen.
Even so. The sheer existence of all of us people, means the environment will forever be changed by our existence. We are a pestilence to the planet and really, the universe…
Just is, what it is…