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And I'd say your viewpoint is extremely narrow. The entire US is effectively "car culture" - and in my (and others) opinions, that car culture has effectively
by phil21 9y ago
And I'd say your viewpoint is extremely narrow.
The entire US is effectively "car culture" - and in my (and others) opinions, that car culture has effectively killed our society. Maybe permanently.
You cannot have a functional society when the majority of productive people sequester themselves off from "the others" into little boxes set apart from each other, never interacting with anyone unless it's a planned social engagement. Typically that means extreme segregation - which we're seeing.
The car - and the resulting car-based society (basically every single community/transportation project in the past 50+ years has been car-centric) - gives you the beginnings of the total social breakdown we are experiencing.
That wouldn't be an entirely bad thing necessarily - it would mean people chose that. Unfortunately they didn't. Car culture (and the suburban culture it enabled) was subsidized by the rest of society practically from day one.
- King-Aaron 9y agoI don't think the activity of driving cars is as socially segregating as you feel it is. I have no metrics to base this on, of course. However your comment seems slightly hyperbolic to me.
- phil21 9y ago> However your comment seems slightly hyperbolic to me. Perhaps, and I will say I have no hard data either so it's simply anecdote. However the older I get and the more I travel and witness other cultures - I continue to come back to this conclusion. After being a hardcore car+suburban lifestyle sort of guy in my youth. It takes a village to raise a child and also have a functional community, and the US has very few villages left. The village empties out during the day and is basically a wasteland of people who barely know each other. I don't think it's so much cars necessarily, it's the ability for people to self-segregate and pretend they are not part of a larger whole or part of an actual functional community. The ability to remove yourself from social situations you helped create (by simply existing), but want to ignore and shove off on other people. There are a few suburbs that are socially functional, but they are in the extreme minority in my experience. This laughable trope that a nuclear family is a self-sufficient unit has to die.
- rootusrootus 9y agoI actually agree with you that the construct of a nuclear family seems counterproductive. But I don't agree that the car has anything to do with it. Industrialization and the corresponding reduction in scarcity seem like bigger drivers.
- phil21 9y agoFair enough. I don't think the car was the only driver, but I (obviously) believe it was one of the primary enablers if nothing else. I also agree with your earlier comment that perhaps the US would not be in the dominant economic position it is today without the car. It enabled extremely rapid economic growth, and that should not be discounted. I simply feel what it enabled in terms of society and lifestyle will be our undoing. I also agree it's only one factor of many however, and I'm not entirely sure what importance to put on it. Talk to me in 10 years after I get through a lot more reading and thought on the subject :)
- rootusrootus 9y agoIt is arguable that the United States would not be in the position it is today -- good or bad -- without the car. Absolutely true. But you have only made an argument, not backed up with anything like data, that it has been bad. Also, if you take a step back and do some research you find that the 'nuclear family' construction dates back well before we became any sort of car culture, and it did not originate in the U.S. So killing cars is unlikely to save our society.