8 ms·

And America's love affair with the automobile is a well-known abusive relationship that America will never have the courage to leave. From what I have read, Mi

by Mz 9y ago

And America's love affair with the automobile is a well-known abusive relationship that America will never have the courage to leave. From what I have read, Millenials are putting noteworthy pressure on this aspect of American culture. Also, I gave up my car years ago. With the magic of the internet, I work online. I mostly walk everywhere and occasionally take public transit. I think we can change this substantially.

mason240 9y ago
You're free to live how you choose, but don't force others to live how you see fit.
- Mz 9y ago
  I don't see where you get the idea that I am doing anything or have any goal to force anyone to do anything. That seems like a huge and unwarranted leap of logic.
  - mason240 9y ago
    >I think we can change this substantially.
    - Mz 9y ago
      I don't see how that in any way suggests what you are saying. There are a lot of people who currently feel forced into long commutes who hate them. There are a lot of people who are trapped in the situation of they need a car to get to work, they need a job to afford a car because a car is often the second biggest household expense after housing itself. I am talking about opening up options, not putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to give up their car. We currently have many people who feel they have a gun to their head in terms of being forced into needing a car they don't want. Where is your sympathy for their right to choose?
      - mason240 9y ago
        They have right to choose to limit their standard of living, as you have done, and move to an urban core and be completely dependent on transit for transportation. Only one of us wants to "change this substantially."
        sanderjd 9y ago
        Is your argument against "forcing others to live how you see fit" as in your original comment, or against change from the status quo as in these follow on comments? These are not the same thing.
        Mz 9y ago
        Many people are genuinely trapped. Just because I have been able to pull this off does not mean other people are simply free to choose. Urban cores are often insanely expensive and not necessarily where someone wants to live just because they don't want a car. I am wholly unimpressed with your hypocritical comments here that boil down to "Don't tread on ME or interfere with my right to own a car and drive all over the place while the world bends over backwards to make that convenient, but your lifestyle preferences? Oh, fuck you."
        mason240 9y ago
        You're replying to a comment where I made clear that I want you to be able to make your own lifestyle preferences.
        Mz 9y ago
        They have right to choose to limit their standard of living, as you have done, and move to an urban core and be completely dependent on transit for transportation. This is dismissive, insulting of my preference to live without a car and rather hostile. If you were intending to say that you support my right to choose, you failed to communicate that. It came across as contemptuous and is in no way sympathetic to the fact that walkable neighborhoods and public transit are not hostile to drivers the way the current car centric American landscape is hostile to pedestrians.
- phil21 9y ago
  Exactly. Folks who prefer public transit have been forced to live in car culture by folks who fund roads at the expense of pretty much every other form of transportation. In many cases very unethically so. Due to the societal and environmental effects, I think it's pretty clear roads should be in no way subsidized like they currently are. If the "suburbs" had to carry their full economic costs, they would be unaffordable.
  - zanny 9y ago
    There have been several great articles that have floated to the top of HN in recent years about how practically no city in the US can afford to maintain its own road networks because of the extreme subsidies in the past. It is a combination of population density being artificially lowered through cheap road subsidies, constant pressure to eliminate taxes, and gutting alternative transport meaning roads need to satiate all human mobility and thus need huge capacity.
  - mason240 9y ago
    Mass transit is so heavily subsidized that if had to carry it's full economic costs, it would be unaffordable. The light rail lines in my state (MN) don't even make enough from fares to cover their day-to-day operating costs, much less maintenance, and of course tax payers were 100% on the hook for initial construction - with a large chunk of the money coming from automobile taxes. So yes, I would be fine with the costs of roads coming more directly from the people using them, but then we are going to do the same with transit. Deal?
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  Agreed. America's forced dominance of the automobile is pretty grossly unethical. Freedom means the ability to make meaningful choices, and if biking is incredibly dangerous, transit is slow and infrequent, and nothing is within walking distance, then those are hardly meaningful options, are they? Building to support multiple modes of transportation is the freedom-loving thing to do. Want to walk? Go for it! Transit? Sure! Biking? Why not? Driving? Works for me!
  - strictnein 9y ago
    "Freedom" doesn't mean living wherever you want and having every option available to you. It means choosing to live in places that offer the amenities you desire. Want walkable, bikeable, mass transit, etc? Live downtown. Want bigger homes, yards, quite, etc? Live in the suburbs.
    - TulliusCicero 9y ago
      > "Freedom" doesn't mean living wherever you want and having every option available to you. Obviously there's a limit to how reasonable multimodal transportation is. Nobody's expecting decent transit among rural farmland. But we could do better than we're doing now -- MUCH better. > Want bigger homes, yards, quite, etc? Live in the suburbs. The biggest problem with this is that in the US you usually have to choose between one of two extremes which dovetail with your examples. You're either in a big ugly apartment block downtown (or in a downtown-ish area) or you're in a super low density suburb where Cars Are Law. Plenty of countries manage to have more of a gradient, where you can have, say, suburbs of middling density, where driving is easy, but so is walking, biking, and taking the train to the city. I live in Munich at the moment and the suburbs nearby fit this mold perfectly, but in the US such towns are extremely rare. There are still plenty of cars in Munich proper, for that matter. There are just lots of other options too. * Also in most American cities even the downtown still isn't very walkable, definitely isn't bikable, and has crappy transit. There really are only a handful of cities in the US where these things all work reasonably well.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Biking is not "incredibly dangerous". It plenty safe. It is healthy. It however sometimes slows down cars and some drivers are then motivated to frame biking as dangerous activity to stop it. But really really really, biking is not incredibly dangerous.
- specialist 9y ago
  Diverting some of the cheddar from highways to public transit is hardly depriving anyone of their cherished way of life.
  - Mz 9y ago
    In many areas, just removing outright hostile barriers to pedestrians would vastly improve walkability in the US while possibly going entirely unnoticed by drivers. I once walked to a shopping center with a fence partway around the property that forced me to go far out of my way to go in using the car entrance. A small gap in the fence next to the cross walk would have done wonders for me and most drivers would not have noticed the difference.
- grillvogel 9y ago
  well by choosing to drive yourself to work every day in a wasteful petroleum burning vehicle you are forcing the rest of us to live with your pollution
  - pluto24 9y ago
    I drive a Civic hybrid. My decision to not have kids has had a far greater environmental impact.
  - mason240 9y ago
    And that's why electric cars will the death of anti-car sentiment.
    - Mz 9y ago
      The lead batteries make them less "clean" than many people imagine. Lead is a hazardous waste, batteries do not last forever and car batteries are quite large.
      - pluto24 9y ago
        That's why they're recycled. http://slbatterytire.com/blog/view/what-happens-to-my-old-car-battery http://slbatterytire.com/blog/view/what-happens-to-my-old-ca...
lghh 9y ago
> With the magic of the internet, I work online Which is great for us developers, but not so much for most service industry workers.
- Mz 9y ago
  I'm not a developer. You can have an HN account without being a developer.
  - sanderjd 9y ago
    But you're also not working at a Starbucks or a Chipotle. This is what your parent was talking about: a lot of the jobs in our economy require physically being where your customers are.
    - Mz 9y ago
      I am aware that many jobs require physically being there. That is not at all what the reply to me said. I am a writer. I am quite poor. In fact, I am currently homeless. I have been bitching via blog here recently about my frustrations with the widespread attitudes that writers don't deserve to be paid dirt, never mind that people online expect good quality writing to be readily available on the internet. Somehow, that high quality writing should magically appear without paying anyone for it in any way. I don't make much money. I wish I had a better income. I am really glad I can make money online at all, but, no, I am not part of some privileged elite with money, power, mobility, etc. I do have mobility. I do cherish it and it enormously enhances my life. But life is a great deal more complicated than those who have ALL the bennies and those who are nothing but crapped on in every way imaginable. This isn't even a case of shades of grey. Life is incredibly Technicolor and varied. I think it is completely legitimate to give some push back against the enormous amount of assumption in both that reply and yours. I would like to see us come up with better solutions than we currently have. That will not happen if we blithely tolerate what amounts to classist assumptions dominating any and every supposed intelligent discussion.
      - deleted 9y ago
puranjay 9y ago
I woke up to a flat tire about two months ago. Don't know why, but that was the breaking point for me. Since then, I haven't driven a single day. I walk, take the metro or get an Uber. I haven't been happier. Driving was easily the worst part of my day.
- Mz 9y ago
  I have two sons. At the time that we chose to go carless, we were living in an apartment complex with endless speed bumps. Driving over the speed bumps into and out of the complex daily was about 3 minutes of torture that we were completely thrilled to give up. Humorously, we have had occasion to put me on a bus for some reason while they walked to the destination in question. I would get ahead of them, then the bus would get stuck in traffic and they would get ahead of me. We all arrived at the spot in question within a couple of minutes of each other. Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe. Short local trips don't see as much gain in speed as Americans seem to imagine. I think this belief persists in part because so many people just don't walk anywhere at all. They drive everywhere, even if they are only going 1/4 mile or something silly like that.
  - LordKano 9y ago
    Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe. I'm going to have to disagree on this one. I can drive to my local Wal-Mart in about 5 minutes. It would take me 30 minutes to walk there. I can drive there. Do my shopping, wait in line, pay, cart my stuff back out to my vehicle and drive home in less than the amount of time it would take to walk there.
    - specialist 9y ago
      Mz is clearly referring to urban (civilized) areas. The closest WalMart to me (checking...) is 13 miles away.

by Mz 9y ago

mason240 9y ago

You're free to live how you choose, but don't force others to live how you see fit.

Mz 9y ago
I don't see where you get the idea that I am doing anything or have any goal to force anyone to do anything. That seems like a huge and unwarranted leap of logic.
- mason240 9y ago
  >I think we can change this substantially.
  - Mz 9y ago
    I don't see how that in any way suggests what you are saying. There are a lot of people who currently feel forced into long commutes who hate them. There are a lot of people who are trapped in the situation of they need a car to get to work, they need a job to afford a car because a car is often the second biggest household expense after housing itself. I am talking about opening up options, not putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to give up their car. We currently have many people who feel they have a gun to their head in terms of being forced into needing a car they don't want. Where is your sympathy for their right to choose?
    - mason240 9y ago
      They have right to choose to limit their standard of living, as you have done, and move to an urban core and be completely dependent on transit for transportation. Only one of us wants to "change this substantially."
      - sanderjd 9y ago
        Is your argument against "forcing others to live how you see fit" as in your original comment, or against change from the status quo as in these follow on comments? These are not the same thing.
      - Mz 9y ago
        Many people are genuinely trapped. Just because I have been able to pull this off does not mean other people are simply free to choose. Urban cores are often insanely expensive and not necessarily where someone wants to live just because they don't want a car. I am wholly unimpressed with your hypocritical comments here that boil down to "Don't tread on ME or interfere with my right to own a car and drive all over the place while the world bends over backwards to make that convenient, but your lifestyle preferences? Oh, fuck you."
        mason240 9y ago
        You're replying to a comment where I made clear that I want you to be able to make your own lifestyle preferences.
        Mz 9y ago
        They have right to choose to limit their standard of living, as you have done, and move to an urban core and be completely dependent on transit for transportation. This is dismissive, insulting of my preference to live without a car and rather hostile. If you were intending to say that you support my right to choose, you failed to communicate that. It came across as contemptuous and is in no way sympathetic to the fact that walkable neighborhoods and public transit are not hostile to drivers the way the current car centric American landscape is hostile to pedestrians.
phil21 9y ago
Exactly. Folks who prefer public transit have been forced to live in car culture by folks who fund roads at the expense of pretty much every other form of transportation. In many cases very unethically so. Due to the societal and environmental effects, I think it's pretty clear roads should be in no way subsidized like they currently are. If the "suburbs" had to carry their full economic costs, they would be unaffordable.
- zanny 9y ago
  There have been several great articles that have floated to the top of HN in recent years about how practically no city in the US can afford to maintain its own road networks because of the extreme subsidies in the past. It is a combination of population density being artificially lowered through cheap road subsidies, constant pressure to eliminate taxes, and gutting alternative transport meaning roads need to satiate all human mobility and thus need huge capacity.
- mason240 9y ago
  Mass transit is so heavily subsidized that if had to carry it's full economic costs, it would be unaffordable. The light rail lines in my state (MN) don't even make enough from fares to cover their day-to-day operating costs, much less maintenance, and of course tax payers were 100% on the hook for initial construction - with a large chunk of the money coming from automobile taxes. So yes, I would be fine with the costs of roads coming more directly from the people using them, but then we are going to do the same with transit. Deal?
TulliusCicero 9y ago
Agreed. America's forced dominance of the automobile is pretty grossly unethical. Freedom means the ability to make meaningful choices, and if biking is incredibly dangerous, transit is slow and infrequent, and nothing is within walking distance, then those are hardly meaningful options, are they? Building to support multiple modes of transportation is the freedom-loving thing to do. Want to walk? Go for it! Transit? Sure! Biking? Why not? Driving? Works for me!
- strictnein 9y ago
  "Freedom" doesn't mean living wherever you want and having every option available to you. It means choosing to live in places that offer the amenities you desire. Want walkable, bikeable, mass transit, etc? Live downtown. Want bigger homes, yards, quite, etc? Live in the suburbs.
  - TulliusCicero 9y ago
    > "Freedom" doesn't mean living wherever you want and having every option available to you. Obviously there's a limit to how reasonable multimodal transportation is. Nobody's expecting decent transit among rural farmland. But we could do better than we're doing now -- MUCH better. > Want bigger homes, yards, quite, etc? Live in the suburbs. The biggest problem with this is that in the US you usually have to choose between one of two extremes which dovetail with your examples. You're either in a big ugly apartment block downtown (or in a downtown-ish area) or you're in a super low density suburb where Cars Are Law. Plenty of countries manage to have more of a gradient, where you can have, say, suburbs of middling density, where driving is easy, but so is walking, biking, and taking the train to the city. I live in Munich at the moment and the suburbs nearby fit this mold perfectly, but in the US such towns are extremely rare. There are still plenty of cars in Munich proper, for that matter. There are just lots of other options too. * Also in most American cities even the downtown still isn't very walkable, definitely isn't bikable, and has crappy transit. There really are only a handful of cities in the US where these things all work reasonably well.
- watwut 9y ago
  Biking is not "incredibly dangerous". It plenty safe. It is healthy. It however sometimes slows down cars and some drivers are then motivated to frame biking as dangerous activity to stop it. But really really really, biking is not incredibly dangerous.
specialist 9y ago
Diverting some of the cheddar from highways to public transit is hardly depriving anyone of their cherished way of life.
- Mz 9y ago
  In many areas, just removing outright hostile barriers to pedestrians would vastly improve walkability in the US while possibly going entirely unnoticed by drivers. I once walked to a shopping center with a fence partway around the property that forced me to go far out of my way to go in using the car entrance. A small gap in the fence next to the cross walk would have done wonders for me and most drivers would not have noticed the difference.
grillvogel 9y ago
well by choosing to drive yourself to work every day in a wasteful petroleum burning vehicle you are forcing the rest of us to live with your pollution
- pluto24 9y ago
  I drive a Civic hybrid. My decision to not have kids has had a far greater environmental impact.
- mason240 9y ago
  And that's why electric cars will the death of anti-car sentiment.
  - Mz 9y ago
    The lead batteries make them less "clean" than many people imagine. Lead is a hazardous waste, batteries do not last forever and car batteries are quite large.
    - pluto24 9y ago
      That's why they're recycled. http://slbatterytire.com/blog/view/what-happens-to-my-old-car-battery http://slbatterytire.com/blog/view/what-happens-to-my-old-ca...

lghh 9y ago

> With the magic of the internet, I work online Which is great for us developers, but not so much for most service industry workers.

Mz 9y ago
I'm not a developer. You can have an HN account without being a developer.
- sanderjd 9y ago
  But you're also not working at a Starbucks or a Chipotle. This is what your parent was talking about: a lot of the jobs in our economy require physically being where your customers are.
  - Mz 9y ago
    I am aware that many jobs require physically being there. That is not at all what the reply to me said. I am a writer. I am quite poor. In fact, I am currently homeless. I have been bitching via blog here recently about my frustrations with the widespread attitudes that writers don't deserve to be paid dirt, never mind that people online expect good quality writing to be readily available on the internet. Somehow, that high quality writing should magically appear without paying anyone for it in any way. I don't make much money. I wish I had a better income. I am really glad I can make money online at all, but, no, I am not part of some privileged elite with money, power, mobility, etc. I do have mobility. I do cherish it and it enormously enhances my life. But life is a great deal more complicated than those who have ALL the bennies and those who are nothing but crapped on in every way imaginable. This isn't even a case of shades of grey. Life is incredibly Technicolor and varied. I think it is completely legitimate to give some push back against the enormous amount of assumption in both that reply and yours. I would like to see us come up with better solutions than we currently have. That will not happen if we blithely tolerate what amounts to classist assumptions dominating any and every supposed intelligent discussion.
    - deleted 9y ago

puranjay 9y ago

I woke up to a flat tire about two months ago. Don't know why, but that was the breaking point for me. Since then, I haven't driven a single day. I walk, take the metro or get an Uber. I haven't been happier. Driving was easily the worst part of my day.

Mz 9y ago
I have two sons. At the time that we chose to go carless, we were living in an apartment complex with endless speed bumps. Driving over the speed bumps into and out of the complex daily was about 3 minutes of torture that we were completely thrilled to give up. Humorously, we have had occasion to put me on a bus for some reason while they walked to the destination in question. I would get ahead of them, then the bus would get stuck in traffic and they would get ahead of me. We all arrived at the spot in question within a couple of minutes of each other. Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe. Short local trips don't see as much gain in speed as Americans seem to imagine. I think this belief persists in part because so many people just don't walk anywhere at all. They drive everywhere, even if they are only going 1/4 mile or something silly like that.
- LordKano 9y ago
  Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe. I'm going to have to disagree on this one. I can drive to my local Wal-Mart in about 5 minutes. It would take me 30 minutes to walk there. I can drive there. Do my shopping, wait in line, pay, cart my stuff back out to my vehicle and drive home in less than the amount of time it would take to walk there.
  - specialist 9y ago
    Mz is clearly referring to urban (civilized) areas. The closest WalMart to me (checking...) is 13 miles away.