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Another way of stating this could be "transport is a policy question." How cities are built and what transport infrastructure they're built around. Im fairly s

Another way of stating this could be "transport is a policy question." How cities are built and what transport infrastructure they're built around. Im fairly sympathetic to the overall aims of this article. I think a transport system more similar to those in the Netherlands makes for better urban landscapes. But... this habitual style of treating everything as a conspiracy, built around a personified enemy ("They gave legal force to a mind-set—let’s call it automobile supremacy—that kills 40,000 Americans a year)... this way of thinking isn't doing us any favours. In day-to-day political conversations and articles, it's mostly just formulaic and lazy. Name the conspiracy, point to vested interests that have been influencing policy, find a link to established personifications of evil.. big oil and segregation, in this case. I'm not saying we should never think in abstractions... but there is a formulaic pattern here that's old, paranoid and harmful.

nerdponx 7y ago
I'm not saying we should never think in abstractions... but there is a formulaic pattern here that's old, paranoid and harmful. Except these conspiracies were (and are) generally real, and their effects are real. The pattern isn't journalistic, it's historical.
- dalbasal 7y ago
  It's both historical & journalistic. Capitalism, corporatism, empire, patriarchy, globalism public choice, regulatory capture... these do all relate to reality, but they are not reality themselves. They are abstractions. A potentially useful way of seeing a broad picture, but also hazardous. Spending too many brain cycles in these abstractions makes us formulaic. We no longer see unique & specific examples, just uninteresting specific examples of a greater truth. We all do it. It's inevitable. It's how we think, especially politically. But, it is worth consiously avoiding, in my opinion.
  - 8note 7y ago
    yeah, it's like np problems. Nobody needs to talk about the travellingn salesman, and it's harmful to even say it's an no problem, since we already have SAT solvers, and that's all we need to understand that np problems are hard to solve.
  - clairity 7y ago
    your point seems to be directed at how human discussions happen generally and how we must necessarily abstract away details to even have those discussions at all. but we sometimes collectively need to grind through the ruts a number of times before finding a good solution, especially if the solution involves a variable abstracted away by the model. so why specifically does your noted pitfall need to be avoided? and what alternatives can you offer? but more to the point, what's the model of car-centric cities you'd advocate?
- mcguire 7y ago
  This is absolutely true. Why, I myself am a member of no less than 8 conspiracies that I know of. Of course, I can't tell you any further details; that would defeat the point of a conspiracy after all. The problem is that I keep forgetting the secret handshakes. One of these days, I'm going to leave my thumb out rather than in and someone's going to shank me with a shiv. Or shiv me with a shank; I can't remember how that goes either.
reallydontask 7y ago
> But... this habitual style of treating everything as a conspiracy, built around a personified enemy ("They gave legal force to a mind-set—let’s call it automobile supremacy—that kills 40,000 Americans a year)... this way of thinking isn't doing us any favours. I get what you are saying, but isn't it, in this case, a relatively accurate description of what happened? If not all over the US, at least in some big cities.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  It has the tone of that breathless protestor you see on Market Street yelling about contrails making the frogs gay or whatever.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
Totally agree and totally ignores the fact that people like the flexibility and freedom (in fact as well as psychologically) Unfortuetly this area and "green" in general does I am afraid does tend to attract "hobbyist" / "crank" activists. (I am using these terms in the political sense and not dising peoples hobbys Eg the green movement needs to concentrate on the present problem (runaway global heating) and not on pious things like banning plastic straws.
- tremon 7y ago
  Speaking as a Dutchman, I experience much more flexibility and freedom riding a bike than my car. That's probably a consequence of both the overcrowding of our roads, and the density of our infrastructure -- I rarely have to drive more than 15 minutes to reach any kind of shop, and by bike I can take shortcuts that my car can't follow, especially in inner cities. Ultimately, my car has been relegated to recreational purposes only -- everything else in my life (work, shopping, friends) I can do by bike or public transport. For me, it doesn't really feel like a conscious personal choice -- it feels more like the pragmatic consequence of our infrastructure design.
  - vixen99 7y ago
    And it helps to live in a famously flat country.
    - bancars 7y ago
      We need to give this argument a rest. Cycling infrastructure has everything to do with availability and very little to do with hills. I don’t avoid biking to work because of the hills, I avoid it because it’s treacherous.
      - lostjohnny 7y ago
        Disclaimer: I don't like cars, I love driving, but as a sport, not in urban areas. Biking is like running, playing soccer, playing tennis, swimming, many people don't do it because they don't do any sport. Biking requires skills that normal people usually don't have, but that they believe they have. It is in fact more dangerous than driving (compared to the driver, not pedestrians) As soon as older people could not bike anymore, they started buying electric scooters and in Holland they have now more deaths caused by scooter accidents than cars. France is going to ban them because they are too dangerous. People than cannot drive anymore because of age or because they had their driving license revoked, started using less "law encumbered" vehicles and the number of accidents began to rise. People on bikes are less controlled,they are not forced to use safety measures, they are not inside a "secured box", they don't have anti intrusion bars, air bags, safety belts, etc. etc. Very few wear an helmet, many of them don't follow street rules, they bike on the sidewalk, very fast, they are very quiet and many pedestrian don't hear them coming. They pay a lot less taxes (and fines), taxes used to implement mobility politics. In Italy, for example, the money that cities earn from fines, cannot be used for anything else than mobility. City planning is complicated, you don't solve problems just by changing few rules, you have to carefully plan for them Changing a model that has been THE model for at least half a century and that have become so popular because freed people from the task of commuting or having to go somewhere, fast, without having to share the ride with other 150 people, just like the washing machine freed women from the task of washing clothes, it's not an easy task. EDIT I don't want to give the idea that cities are doomed, but biking is not the solution, biking is just like cars but with different problems, THE solution is walkability. Walkable cities are for everyone. Bikeable cities are just for bikers.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
Yet if you look at the countries that are held up as examples to follow you will find the one thing they have in common is no substantial domestic car industry. You can't ignore the politics of this.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Aren't Japanese cities often talked about as an example of good public transport (particularly trains) and reasonably dense areas with low housing prices?
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    True, although Japan is so different from the West culturally that I'm not sure you can make realistic comparisons.
    - dannyw 7y ago
      Counties with significant domestic car industries: * USA * Japan Countries out of the first list, with policies favouring cars: 1/2 Conclusion: Insufficient data.
      - sokoloff 7y ago
        German public transportation is also excellent and if they aren’t considered to have a significant domestic car industry, I’m not sure who else does qualify.
        SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
        France too.
      - dalbasal 7y ago
        If you add in Germany, I think you get 1.5/3
tomohawk 7y ago
No conspiracy required when a lot of people are acting according to a common view. People see the real advantages of owning a car and the freedom it brings, and that activity builds industries and has an impact on policies. Of course, GM really did conspire to put the trolleys out of business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... However, this is the kind of thing organizations (companies, government agencies, non profits) do when they get to a certain size or have accomplished initial goals and are looking to conquer that next frontier. Just look at the overreach of the SV titans, for example. For better or worse, we have a car based society now, and pining for the good old days is backwards looking. The next thing should preserve the immense freedom and flexibility that cars brought. Prescribing a top down solution that gives even more power to the state at the expense of the people is a non starter.
- taurath 7y ago
  I sort of agree - I just wish there were more options, that didn’t have the same tradeoffs on alertness and attention that driving a car has. Self driving vehicles will certainly sell themselves.
- joking 7y ago
  maybe the trolleys where substituted by the coaches because there were more cheap to use, you don't have to create a network of cables overhead, and with cheap gas there where no need to electrify the public transport. The coaches have the benefit to be able to go anywhere and modify your routes as suits you, while the trolleys need a fixed infrastructure. Both have their own pros and cons, so i don't see the need for a conspiracy.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    As a rough estimate, a streetcar line is more efficient than a bus line above 40,000 passengers per day. My city (Dresden, Germany) has a bus line with 70,000 passengers per day, and you can really see it cracking at the seams. During rush hour, busses run every 3 minutes, and that interval cannot be increased any further because the busses would start blocking each other, thus backing up from the bus stop into the road and creating additional congestion. The only thing the city can do (and that's what they're working on) is to upgrade from bus to streetcar. Dresden has some of the longest trams in the world, at 45 meters (50 yards), and these carry 3-4 bus loads at once.
nickpsecurity 7y ago
I too don't like the article presented that way. I should note that it was a conspiracy in this case. Automobile manufacturers ran media campaigns and lobbied to make walking across the street a crime. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM Most of these are also laws passed by groups of people deciding to control others for a mix of perceived altruistic and selfish reasons. It's not secret but there's people conspiring.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  People acting together is not a conspiracy. That waters down the definition of conspiracy to the point of uselessness.
- carapace 7y ago
  Man, I was talking about this a couple of years ago and got called a conspiracy nut. I was like, "crack a history book." Now I can just point to this video. Cheers! (FWIW, Robert Anton Wilson once pointed out that, of regime changes in the 20th century, over half of them were the result of some sort of coup. In other words, conspiracy is normal. Make of that what you will.)
  - nickpsecurity 7y ago
    Yeah, it is. Glad to see another person realize it. Most write-ups about it act as if believing in conspiracies requires a nutball. Whereas, the world is full of actual conspiracies going on all the time. I wrote a counterpoint to Bruce Schneier saying that: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_psychology_7.html#c1503021 https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_psycholog...
    - carapace 7y ago
      Wow, very nice. FWIW, you identified the reason(s) why I'm personally not concerned about general erosion of privacy, while bring very concerned about differential erosion of privacy. - - - - A though, can animals conspire? It's something that almost seems to require intelligence and "higher level" communication. Do chimpanzees conspire? Would there be an adaptive advantage to conspiracy skepticism? Is that why conspiracy skepticism is so common? Most people are followers and a few are... tricky?... leaders? Maybe rampant conspiracy is a phase between the moment of evolution of intelligence and the time when "fake news" forces fidelity to reality? It's trivial to show that conspiracy is only ever a local optimum. Multiple competing "truths" incur caloric cost to maintain, but honesty is maximally efficient. Maybe we all get a clue, become scrupulously truthful, solve all our problems, and go on to live in a new Golden Age...
dcre 7y ago
It's not personified, it's almost the opposite — to insitutionalize the mindset in the form of law is precisely to depersonalize it, take it out of any individual's hands. The reason this pattern seems so common to you is because it is an extremely important phenomenon in modernity. See Max Weber on the rationalization of society[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(sociology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(sociology)
mfer 7y ago
> How cities are built and what transport infrastructure they're built around. Context is important. The population of cities has grown. For example, the Chicago metro area has 70% more people now than in 1950. Population growth has impacted car ownership and use. We shouldn't use today's context against the past. Things were different and that's worth considering. Urban areas are about 3% of the US physical space. The design of transportation for dense cities (and they are getting denser) is different from that of suburban or rural spaces. There is no one size fits all.

nerdponx 7y ago

I'm not saying we should never think in abstractions... but there is a formulaic pattern here that's old, paranoid and harmful. Except these conspiracies were (and are) generally real, and their effects are real. The pattern isn't journalistic, it's historical.

dalbasal 7y ago
It's both historical & journalistic. Capitalism, corporatism, empire, patriarchy, globalism public choice, regulatory capture... these do all relate to reality, but they are not reality themselves. They are abstractions. A potentially useful way of seeing a broad picture, but also hazardous. Spending too many brain cycles in these abstractions makes us formulaic. We no longer see unique & specific examples, just uninteresting specific examples of a greater truth. We all do it. It's inevitable. It's how we think, especially politically. But, it is worth consiously avoiding, in my opinion.
- 8note 7y ago
  yeah, it's like np problems. Nobody needs to talk about the travellingn salesman, and it's harmful to even say it's an no problem, since we already have SAT solvers, and that's all we need to understand that np problems are hard to solve.
- clairity 7y ago
  your point seems to be directed at how human discussions happen generally and how we must necessarily abstract away details to even have those discussions at all. but we sometimes collectively need to grind through the ruts a number of times before finding a good solution, especially if the solution involves a variable abstracted away by the model. so why specifically does your noted pitfall need to be avoided? and what alternatives can you offer? but more to the point, what's the model of car-centric cities you'd advocate?
mcguire 7y ago
This is absolutely true. Why, I myself am a member of no less than 8 conspiracies that I know of. Of course, I can't tell you any further details; that would defeat the point of a conspiracy after all. The problem is that I keep forgetting the secret handshakes. One of these days, I'm going to leave my thumb out rather than in and someone's going to shank me with a shiv. Or shiv me with a shank; I can't remember how that goes either.

reallydontask 7y ago

> But... this habitual style of treating everything as a conspiracy, built around a personified enemy ("They gave legal force to a mind-set—let’s call it automobile supremacy—that kills 40,000 Americans a year)... this way of thinking isn't doing us any favours. I get what you are saying, but isn't it, in this case, a relatively accurate description of what happened? If not all over the US, at least in some big cities.

scarejunba 7y ago
It has the tone of that breathless protestor you see on Market Street yelling about contrails making the frogs gay or whatever.

C1sc0cat 7y ago

Totally agree and totally ignores the fact that people like the flexibility and freedom (in fact as well as psychologically) Unfortuetly this area and "green" in general does I am afraid does tend to attract "hobbyist" / "crank" activists. (I am using these terms in the political sense and not dising peoples hobbys Eg the green movement needs to concentrate on the present problem (runaway global heating) and not on pious things like banning plastic straws.

tremon 7y ago
Speaking as a Dutchman, I experience much more flexibility and freedom riding a bike than my car. That's probably a consequence of both the overcrowding of our roads, and the density of our infrastructure -- I rarely have to drive more than 15 minutes to reach any kind of shop, and by bike I can take shortcuts that my car can't follow, especially in inner cities. Ultimately, my car has been relegated to recreational purposes only -- everything else in my life (work, shopping, friends) I can do by bike or public transport. For me, it doesn't really feel like a conscious personal choice -- it feels more like the pragmatic consequence of our infrastructure design.
- vixen99 7y ago
  And it helps to live in a famously flat country.
  - bancars 7y ago
    We need to give this argument a rest. Cycling infrastructure has everything to do with availability and very little to do with hills. I don’t avoid biking to work because of the hills, I avoid it because it’s treacherous.
    - lostjohnny 7y ago
      Disclaimer: I don't like cars, I love driving, but as a sport, not in urban areas. Biking is like running, playing soccer, playing tennis, swimming, many people don't do it because they don't do any sport. Biking requires skills that normal people usually don't have, but that they believe they have. It is in fact more dangerous than driving (compared to the driver, not pedestrians) As soon as older people could not bike anymore, they started buying electric scooters and in Holland they have now more deaths caused by scooter accidents than cars. France is going to ban them because they are too dangerous. People than cannot drive anymore because of age or because they had their driving license revoked, started using less "law encumbered" vehicles and the number of accidents began to rise. People on bikes are less controlled,they are not forced to use safety measures, they are not inside a "secured box", they don't have anti intrusion bars, air bags, safety belts, etc. etc. Very few wear an helmet, many of them don't follow street rules, they bike on the sidewalk, very fast, they are very quiet and many pedestrian don't hear them coming. They pay a lot less taxes (and fines), taxes used to implement mobility politics. In Italy, for example, the money that cities earn from fines, cannot be used for anything else than mobility. City planning is complicated, you don't solve problems just by changing few rules, you have to carefully plan for them Changing a model that has been THE model for at least half a century and that have become so popular because freed people from the task of commuting or having to go somewhere, fast, without having to share the ride with other 150 people, just like the washing machine freed women from the task of washing clothes, it's not an easy task. EDIT I don't want to give the idea that cities are doomed, but biking is not the solution, biking is just like cars but with different problems, THE solution is walkability. Walkable cities are for everyone. Bikeable cities are just for bikers.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago

Yet if you look at the countries that are held up as examples to follow you will find the one thing they have in common is no substantial domestic car industry. You can't ignore the politics of this.

icebraining 7y ago
Aren't Japanese cities often talked about as an example of good public transport (particularly trains) and reasonably dense areas with low housing prices?
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  True, although Japan is so different from the West culturally that I'm not sure you can make realistic comparisons.
  - dannyw 7y ago
    Counties with significant domestic car industries: * USA * Japan Countries out of the first list, with policies favouring cars: 1/2 Conclusion: Insufficient data.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      German public transportation is also excellent and if they aren’t considered to have a significant domestic car industry, I’m not sure who else does qualify.
      - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
        France too.
    - dalbasal 7y ago
      If you add in Germany, I think you get 1.5/3

tomohawk 7y ago

No conspiracy required when a lot of people are acting according to a common view. People see the real advantages of owning a car and the freedom it brings, and that activity builds industries and has an impact on policies. Of course, GM really did conspire to put the trolleys out of business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... However, this is the kind of thing organizations (companies, government agencies, non profits) do when they get to a certain size or have accomplished initial goals and are looking to conquer that next frontier. Just look at the overreach of the SV titans, for example. For better or worse, we have a car based society now, and pining for the good old days is backwards looking. The next thing should preserve the immense freedom and flexibility that cars brought. Prescribing a top down solution that gives even more power to the state at the expense of the people is a non starter.

taurath 7y ago
I sort of agree - I just wish there were more options, that didn’t have the same tradeoffs on alertness and attention that driving a car has. Self driving vehicles will certainly sell themselves.
joking 7y ago
maybe the trolleys where substituted by the coaches because there were more cheap to use, you don't have to create a network of cables overhead, and with cheap gas there where no need to electrify the public transport. The coaches have the benefit to be able to go anywhere and modify your routes as suits you, while the trolleys need a fixed infrastructure. Both have their own pros and cons, so i don't see the need for a conspiracy.
- majewsky 7y ago
  As a rough estimate, a streetcar line is more efficient than a bus line above 40,000 passengers per day. My city (Dresden, Germany) has a bus line with 70,000 passengers per day, and you can really see it cracking at the seams. During rush hour, busses run every 3 minutes, and that interval cannot be increased any further because the busses would start blocking each other, thus backing up from the bus stop into the road and creating additional congestion. The only thing the city can do (and that's what they're working on) is to upgrade from bus to streetcar. Dresden has some of the longest trams in the world, at 45 meters (50 yards), and these carry 3-4 bus loads at once.

nickpsecurity 7y ago

I too don't like the article presented that way. I should note that it was a conspiracy in this case. Automobile manufacturers ran media campaigns and lobbied to make walking across the street a crime. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM Most of these are also laws passed by groups of people deciding to control others for a mix of perceived altruistic and selfish reasons. It's not secret but there's people conspiring.

vonmoltke 7y ago
People acting together is not a conspiracy. That waters down the definition of conspiracy to the point of uselessness.
carapace 7y ago
Man, I was talking about this a couple of years ago and got called a conspiracy nut. I was like, "crack a history book." Now I can just point to this video. Cheers! (FWIW, Robert Anton Wilson once pointed out that, of regime changes in the 20th century, over half of them were the result of some sort of coup. In other words, conspiracy is normal. Make of that what you will.)
- nickpsecurity 7y ago
  Yeah, it is. Glad to see another person realize it. Most write-ups about it act as if believing in conspiracies requires a nutball. Whereas, the world is full of actual conspiracies going on all the time. I wrote a counterpoint to Bruce Schneier saying that: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_psychology_7.html#c1503021 https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_psycholog...
  - carapace 7y ago
    Wow, very nice. FWIW, you identified the reason(s) why I'm personally not concerned about general erosion of privacy, while bring very concerned about differential erosion of privacy. - - - - A though, can animals conspire? It's something that almost seems to require intelligence and "higher level" communication. Do chimpanzees conspire? Would there be an adaptive advantage to conspiracy skepticism? Is that why conspiracy skepticism is so common? Most people are followers and a few are... tricky?... leaders? Maybe rampant conspiracy is a phase between the moment of evolution of intelligence and the time when "fake news" forces fidelity to reality? It's trivial to show that conspiracy is only ever a local optimum. Multiple competing "truths" incur caloric cost to maintain, but honesty is maximally efficient. Maybe we all get a clue, become scrupulously truthful, solve all our problems, and go on to live in a new Golden Age...

dcre 7y ago

It's not personified, it's almost the opposite — to insitutionalize the mindset in the form of law is precisely to depersonalize it, take it out of any individual's hands. The reason this pattern seems so common to you is because it is an extremely important phenomenon in modernity. See Max Weber on the rationalization of society[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(sociology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(sociology)

mfer 7y ago

> How cities are built and what transport infrastructure they're built around. Context is important. The population of cities has grown. For example, the Chicago metro area has 70% more people now than in 1950. Population growth has impacted car ownership and use. We shouldn't use today's context against the past. Things were different and that's worth considering. Urban areas are about 3% of the US physical space. The design of transportation for dense cities (and they are getting denser) is different from that of suburban or rural spaces. There is no one size fits all.