6 ms·

> Cars are on a pedestal not only because of convenience and speed, but because they're the lowest common denominator. The lowest common denominator? I don't o

> Cars are on a pedestal not only because of convenience and speed, but because they're the lowest common denominator. The lowest common denominator? I don't own a car, and I'm sure many other people in my city don't either, so no: it's not the lowest common denominator for us: walking is. Cars are themselves very expensive and require a massive amount of infrastructure to function. Look around a city and think of all the cars, streets, parking lots, highways, etc, used for cars. Then think how that all impacts any other mode of transportation other than vehicles. Go deeper and imagine a world without those cars - what to do with all this new-found space? The words you're looking for is, "status quo". Cars are on the, "status quo" pedestal. They've replaced everything else because their massively profitable to produce. Damn the long-trail environmental cost of them, or how they've influenced the design of our modern cities.

Kalium 10y ago
Have you considered that with infrastructure in place, cars enable an immense amount of individual flexibility? To my mind, it seems somewhat plausible that cars rose to dominance because they enabled individual flexibility for the masses atop pre-existing and extensible infrastructure.
- justinator 10y ago
  Flexibility? I don't own a car, and haven't for the last decade (and only had a car for maybe a year of my life). This year, I've been driven in a car about four times in > 170 days. So let me talk about flexibility. Think about how much a car costs to buy and own (purchasing, upkeep, insurance, gas, parking, storage) - then put a price on that in hours you work a year. I bet it's a lot! Maybe weeks out of every year. Now, think of not having to work those days, because you don't have car, and those expenses do not apply to you. What would you do with all this time you know have? So many things! I can't even imagine what to do first! Cars enable convenience, not flexibility. But it comes at a huge price: a financial price, an environmental price, and a huge price on the standard of living in the negative direction - not just for people living in fancy cities: the oil field worker, the car factory worker, the people living in third world countries mining some of those conflict materials you all need. There's no free lunch. You can argue about a single car, and how much convenient it is for the individual, but we're talking about something we've produced in the hundreds of millions. There's huge effects of this invention. You know what happens to cars and cities? People live far away from their jobs. Then they talk about their hellish commute. And how much gas costs. And how their neighborhood is boring. And how there's not parking. And how the car needs to go into the shop. And on and on and on. These may all be transparent to you, but without a car, I hear it all the time, and I'm happy - so very happy to be off that spinning wheel. Having lived in Europe a little while (had to do something with all that free time!), intelligent, forward-thinking people, living in cities without cars, because these cities were designed before cars. Other options are created, like public transportation system (and bike sharing schemes) that don't have whatever stigma they have in the states. I don't know for this topic if I'm willing to trade "flexibility" for a massive amount of complexity.
  - Kalium 10y ago
    Friend, I live a life not so different from yours. I'm suggesting that other people choose to have cars now - and historically as well - because they find that the advantages for them outweigh the disadvantages for them. You may want to consider that other people may make their choices for reasons they personally find compelling in the context of their individual lives.
    - davidw 10y ago
      I think very few people are saying "no cars, ever!". We have one and find it very useful, like you say. What many people are realizing is that cars should not be the be-all and end-all of urban design in the US.
      - rando18423 10y ago
        Hong Kong is fucking awesome to get around. Why not moving sidewalks like they have there with the Midlevels Escalators? I used that to walk from Midlevels to Central every day and loved it.
        Turing_Machine 10y ago
        Hong Kong has a population density of 6,544 people/km^2. The United States has a population density of 35 people/km2.
        akovaski 10y ago
        NYC has a population density of 10,831 people/km^2. San Francisco has a population density of 7,124 people/km^2. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make, but I don't think anybody really wants to plan the rural areas of the US in the image of Hong Kong.
  - com2kid 10y ago
    > Think about how much a car costs to buy and own (purchasing, upkeep, insurance, gas, parking, storage) - then put a price on that in hours you work a year. I bet it's a lot! Maybe weeks out of every year. Now, think of not having to work those days, because you don't have car, and those expenses do not apply to you. I own a reliable econo-box that I bought years ago. Maintenance is almost nil, parking is less time than it'd take me to use public transit (which is relatively bad where I live), and underground parking comes with my condo. I am a huge advocate of public transit, but I'll say that cars are pretty nice.
- DorintheFlora 10y ago
  Perhaps you should read some history. IIRC, at some point, car companies bought up public transit infrastructure and shut it down because less public transit was good for sales. #canyousayconflictofinterest? Linky: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con...
  - Kalium 10y ago
    Friend, I am aware of the "streetcar conspiracy". I am also aware that streetcars died out for reasons well beyond conspiracy. I am further aware of many areas where cars are very useful that never had streetcar systems to be destroyed by GM.
    - DorintheFlora 10y ago
      Sorry to have made assumptions. My understanding is that there was no pre-existing infrastructure suitable to cars. The dirt and cobblestone roads that existed were inadequate, to put it nicely. I have read up a good bit on such things and drawn a very different conclusion from you. In the US, personally owned vehicles are critical for sprawling suburbs and rural life. It is a big country with low density. Cars should not be necessary in the big city. Those that are designed well make it possible to live without a car. In much of America, it is quite challenging to live without a car. This is partly due to choices we have made, not because it had to be that way.
      - eru 10y ago
        The cyclist lobbied for some 'proper' roads to be build at first. The cars found them very useful.
        billbrown 10y ago
        I was curious and found this article - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2011/aug/15/cyclists-paved-way-for-roads https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2011/aug/1...
- iwwr 10y ago
  When only few people own cars, those few people have unimaginable freedom. When everyone owns a car, everyone needs one, cars become an instrument of dependence rather than freedom.
hueving 10y ago
>They've replaced everything else because their massively profitable to produce. That's the most ridiculous justification I've heard for anything. A thousand dollar piece of toilet paper is also massively profitable to produce, but nobody would buy it. People buy cars because they are useful. If you think most people don't enjoy the freedom they get from owning a car, you are living in a bubble. I work with people that could take the caltrain and get to work faster, but they still choose their car because of the flexibility in schedule and destinations it gives them. Also, walking is not the lowest common denominator if you have a job far away, have small children, or have a disability.
- Steltek 10y ago
  Cars were very successfully marketed as status symbols and expressions of personal identity. Having a nice car in the suburbs meant your family was safe from the evils of the city. The entire government apparatus spent decades and untold fortunes making the car the fast and flexible option. We now have the benefit of hindsight that tells us it was a massively inefficient use of public funds.
- speeder 10y ago
  I am from Brazil. Here around 1950 the government deliberately gave priority to roads over railroads and rivers as a way to attract car factories, hoping to get their taxes and create employment. Currently in Brazil the laws about import cars are extremely draconian, and taxes are overall sky high, crappy local made cars are frequently 2 times the EU or US price of the same, but higher quality model. People still get in terrible debts, paying sometimes interest that totals several times the principal, to buy cars anyway, not because they are useful, but because frequently they are the only choice. For example in Rio de Janeiro, because of the Olympics, the government deliberately canceled public transportation routes connecting poor areas to the touristic areas, forcing people of poor areas to use cars, specially because parts of the route are impossible to cross on foot (mountains with no hiking trails, with the passage being road tunnels) Or that for the world cup, the government declined several train proposals in favour of making "light train over road" routes, where you just build gigantic roads on pillars and place buses on them.
- 10y ago

Kalium 10y ago

Have you considered that with infrastructure in place, cars enable an immense amount of individual flexibility? To my mind, it seems somewhat plausible that cars rose to dominance because they enabled individual flexibility for the masses atop pre-existing and extensible infrastructure.

justinator 10y ago
Flexibility? I don't own a car, and haven't for the last decade (and only had a car for maybe a year of my life). This year, I've been driven in a car about four times in > 170 days. So let me talk about flexibility. Think about how much a car costs to buy and own (purchasing, upkeep, insurance, gas, parking, storage) - then put a price on that in hours you work a year. I bet it's a lot! Maybe weeks out of every year. Now, think of not having to work those days, because you don't have car, and those expenses do not apply to you. What would you do with all this time you know have? So many things! I can't even imagine what to do first! Cars enable convenience, not flexibility. But it comes at a huge price: a financial price, an environmental price, and a huge price on the standard of living in the negative direction - not just for people living in fancy cities: the oil field worker, the car factory worker, the people living in third world countries mining some of those conflict materials you all need. There's no free lunch. You can argue about a single car, and how much convenient it is for the individual, but we're talking about something we've produced in the hundreds of millions. There's huge effects of this invention. You know what happens to cars and cities? People live far away from their jobs. Then they talk about their hellish commute. And how much gas costs. And how their neighborhood is boring. And how there's not parking. And how the car needs to go into the shop. And on and on and on. These may all be transparent to you, but without a car, I hear it all the time, and I'm happy - so very happy to be off that spinning wheel. Having lived in Europe a little while (had to do something with all that free time!), intelligent, forward-thinking people, living in cities without cars, because these cities were designed before cars. Other options are created, like public transportation system (and bike sharing schemes) that don't have whatever stigma they have in the states. I don't know for this topic if I'm willing to trade "flexibility" for a massive amount of complexity.
- Kalium 10y ago
  Friend, I live a life not so different from yours. I'm suggesting that other people choose to have cars now - and historically as well - because they find that the advantages for them outweigh the disadvantages for them. You may want to consider that other people may make their choices for reasons they personally find compelling in the context of their individual lives.
  - davidw 10y ago
    I think very few people are saying "no cars, ever!". We have one and find it very useful, like you say. What many people are realizing is that cars should not be the be-all and end-all of urban design in the US.
    - rando18423 10y ago
      Hong Kong is fucking awesome to get around. Why not moving sidewalks like they have there with the Midlevels Escalators? I used that to walk from Midlevels to Central every day and loved it.
      - Turing_Machine 10y ago
        Hong Kong has a population density of 6,544 people/km^2. The United States has a population density of 35 people/km2.
        akovaski 10y ago
        NYC has a population density of 10,831 people/km^2. San Francisco has a population density of 7,124 people/km^2. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make, but I don't think anybody really wants to plan the rural areas of the US in the image of Hong Kong.
- com2kid 10y ago
  > Think about how much a car costs to buy and own (purchasing, upkeep, insurance, gas, parking, storage) - then put a price on that in hours you work a year. I bet it's a lot! Maybe weeks out of every year. Now, think of not having to work those days, because you don't have car, and those expenses do not apply to you. I own a reliable econo-box that I bought years ago. Maintenance is almost nil, parking is less time than it'd take me to use public transit (which is relatively bad where I live), and underground parking comes with my condo. I am a huge advocate of public transit, but I'll say that cars are pretty nice.
DorintheFlora 10y ago
Perhaps you should read some history. IIRC, at some point, car companies bought up public transit infrastructure and shut it down because less public transit was good for sales. #canyousayconflictofinterest? Linky: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con...
- Kalium 10y ago
  Friend, I am aware of the "streetcar conspiracy". I am also aware that streetcars died out for reasons well beyond conspiracy. I am further aware of many areas where cars are very useful that never had streetcar systems to be destroyed by GM.
  - DorintheFlora 10y ago
    Sorry to have made assumptions. My understanding is that there was no pre-existing infrastructure suitable to cars. The dirt and cobblestone roads that existed were inadequate, to put it nicely. I have read up a good bit on such things and drawn a very different conclusion from you. In the US, personally owned vehicles are critical for sprawling suburbs and rural life. It is a big country with low density. Cars should not be necessary in the big city. Those that are designed well make it possible to live without a car. In much of America, it is quite challenging to live without a car. This is partly due to choices we have made, not because it had to be that way.
    - eru 10y ago
      The cyclist lobbied for some 'proper' roads to be build at first. The cars found them very useful.
      - billbrown 10y ago
        I was curious and found this article - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2011/aug/15/cyclists-paved-way-for-roads https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2011/aug/1...
iwwr 10y ago
When only few people own cars, those few people have unimaginable freedom. When everyone owns a car, everyone needs one, cars become an instrument of dependence rather than freedom.

hueving 10y ago

>They've replaced everything else because their massively profitable to produce. That's the most ridiculous justification I've heard for anything. A thousand dollar piece of toilet paper is also massively profitable to produce, but nobody would buy it. People buy cars because they are useful. If you think most people don't enjoy the freedom they get from owning a car, you are living in a bubble. I work with people that could take the caltrain and get to work faster, but they still choose their car because of the flexibility in schedule and destinations it gives them. Also, walking is not the lowest common denominator if you have a job far away, have small children, or have a disability.

Steltek 10y ago
Cars were very successfully marketed as status symbols and expressions of personal identity. Having a nice car in the suburbs meant your family was safe from the evils of the city. The entire government apparatus spent decades and untold fortunes making the car the fast and flexible option. We now have the benefit of hindsight that tells us it was a massively inefficient use of public funds.
speeder 10y ago
I am from Brazil. Here around 1950 the government deliberately gave priority to roads over railroads and rivers as a way to attract car factories, hoping to get their taxes and create employment. Currently in Brazil the laws about import cars are extremely draconian, and taxes are overall sky high, crappy local made cars are frequently 2 times the EU or US price of the same, but higher quality model. People still get in terrible debts, paying sometimes interest that totals several times the principal, to buy cars anyway, not because they are useful, but because frequently they are the only choice. For example in Rio de Janeiro, because of the Olympics, the government deliberately canceled public transportation routes connecting poor areas to the touristic areas, forcing people of poor areas to use cars, specially because parts of the route are impossible to cross on foot (mountains with no hiking trails, with the passage being road tunnels) Or that for the world cup, the government declined several train proposals in favour of making "light train over road" routes, where you just build gigantic roads on pillars and place buses on them.
10y ago