4 ms·

I think the biggest problem in modern society is car dependent infrastructure. Cars are the ultimate form of isolation. They isolate us from the intermediate sp

by foxyv 5y ago

I think the biggest problem in modern society is car dependent infrastructure. Cars are the ultimate form of isolation. They isolate us from the intermediate spaces where we interact with other people. Parks, paths, stations, cafes, downtowns, and all the other free public spaces we used to use to meet with other people have been devastated by cars. I can go a week in my suburban home without ever interacting with anyone. Take away the office and the supermarket and you can go for years without talking to anyone. Then I get on my bike, or walk somewhere and suddenly I meet more people in 30 minutes than I did in 3 months.

acabal 5y ago
I completely agree, and I rant about this constantly. But in America at least, cars have infected society to such a degree that for the average person imagining life without them is totally impossible--like asking a fish to imagine life without water. "How would we get groceries?" they ask, and the thought of having a small grocery store within walking distance doesn't even occur to them, because walking is something they haven't done for their entire lives. Building a life of total car dependence in the 1940s-60s is IMHO one of the two great American mistakes of the 20th century, that by destroying local bonds between neighbors and strangers has led to America's current sense of deep, unspecific anxiety and lassitude on a societal level, and on an economic level has set the stage for the destruction of both small town and urban life that we've seen in the past 30 years.
- asdff 5y ago
  People still live car independently but oftentimes its not by choice. Commuting on the bus in LA I would see a lot of old men and women and immigrants who would come onto the bus with groceries or children in tow. That sort of lifestyle is already possible, but we only see people with no other choice in transportation riding the bus for the most part. If we want to convince people to leave the car behind and walk and take the bus to the grocery store, we have to improve the convenience argument of the bus vs. the car. For instance, my trip to costco is an hour on the bus or 20 minutes by car, due to having to transfer to another bus line and the bus being not very frequent, not to mention stuck in traffic. If the bus ran in its own lane and was a lot more frequent, travel time to costco would drop dramatically and might even beat the car commute if the car lanes are clogged with traffic and the bus is moving at full speed without stopping at red lights. It's not even a question of implementing expensive infrastructure like boring out a subway line. The bus lines in LA at least already go everywhere, but are so slow. Buy a few more busses, hire a few more operators, increase frequency dramatically to 5 minute headways all day, paint a lane and install a curb, set the lights to flick green when the bus is coming. Just doing that alone on major bus corridors would do so much good for improving quality of life in LA and be a model for cities around the world of how to incentivize transit in an area dominated by car modal share.
- narrator 5y ago
  The reason for a car dependent lifestyle in the U.S is that people don't want to live around or take public transit with the riffraff. This does not make sense to anyone who lives in Europe. Anyone who lives in a high crime city in the U.S who actually takes public transit knows what I'm talking about. Whether it's morally right or wrong, that's the reason America is set up the way it is.
  - acabal 5y ago
    The reason for our car dependent lifestyle is that America was specifically and purposefully engineered that way during and after WW2. Pre-war, Americans had a rich urban and small town life much like Europe had and still has to an extent. The only reason we lost it was due to misguided urban planning, encouraged by lobbying from the auto industry.
    - r00fus 5y ago
      Who Framed Roger Rabbit essentially narrates this story of the demise of the trolley.
  - ketzo 5y ago
    I mean, that's a chicken-and-egg thing. The more people who use public transit, the more resources get devoted to it, and the less it feels "trashy" or like a place for "riffraff". Conversely, the fewer people who use transit, the more grim it feels for those who do use it. The existence of public transit does not necessitate crime.
  - null_object 5y ago
    > The reason for a car dependent lifestyle in the U.S is that people don't want to live around or take public transit with the riffraff. This does not make sense to anyone who lives in Europe. This sort of US vs Europe stuff I read on HN regarding car use just isn’t binary at all: some countries in Europe are very car-dependent, others less so. Not all of us are like The Netherlands or Denmark, unfortunately.
  - Johnythree 5y ago
- Noos 5y ago
  except that the small grocery stores have poor selection, expensive prices, and are more inconvenient since you have to spend more time every day to get your things instead of shopping for the month. Some of us work long hours and don't have a wife who can spend the time to do things like that. Some of us know about both options, and a car is much better. People like cars because they are freedom; you are free to go where you want without relying on public transit schedules or the realization you have maybe a five mile radius of places you can walk to in an hour.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    The city I lived in before this had bodegas that had a decent selection, pretty much all the basics, and were not expensive. It was nice to be able to walk a couple blocks if you just needed a few ingredients. I and many others got a lot of the basics - beans, tortillas, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, spices - from there.
  - foxyv 5y ago
    I remember the first time I got a car. It was definitely freeing. But mostly because I lived in a car dependent garbage town. Everything was miles apart and criss crossed by death roads where walkers and cyclists had to be on full alert to avoid getting smeared by someone driving on a sidewalk or coming out of a driveway backwards at 30 mph. I remember the first time I moved somewhere I didn't NEED a car to survive and it was AMAZING. All of a sudden the car went from being a source of freedom to an anchor. I didn't realize how much time, money, and pain went into owning one. Insurance, registration, fuel, parking, maintenance, stressful driving, terrible commutes, time consuming trips to a grocery store, TRAFFIC, planning meals a week at a time, worrying about where I parked it, designated drivers and getting fatter every day. Cars are just a pain. If you live in the middle of nowhere a car is the best thing in the world. It expands your access to everything. Living somewhere you don't need a car is is SO MUCH BETTER.
- r00fus 5y ago
  This really hit home for me when my sibling and I realized our aging mom was unfit to be able to drive. 4 accidents in a year meant unreasonable insurance premiums and replacement not to mention she was injured. Going car-free really hit her independence and for 2 years, she was aching to buy a car and get more mobile. It hurt me to see her like that but I couldn't let her get behind a wheel again despite her constant complaints. Nowadays she's mostly adjusted using Lyft/Uber to go to the doctor or visit family but walking to see friends and go shopping (walk score for her place is very decent). The impact to her self-esteem hasn't quite recovered yet. Society in general even for an older individual places a LOT of worth on us being "drivers" - popular media reinforces it (just listen and you'll get tons of car references in pop music and movies). I wish she could move to somewhere like France where this isn't the case, but that ship sailed quite a few years ago.
swayvil 5y ago
Vast widescale poverty might cure this social ailment. Seriously. Like the monks say, "my poverty is my shield".
dandellion 5y ago
I don't think cars are that big of a factor, but rather how pretty much everything that could be automated has been. I live in a small town in southern Europe, and I rarely need to talk to more than four or five people in any normal week, and those conversations are usually pretty short. I can work remotely, buy necessities and pay for them without talking to anybody, do taxes, etc. I sometimes have to talk with the neighbours, plumber or my doctor, but those are pretty rare. Considering how easy it is to do everything I need with almost no interactions, I'm not surprised people are becoming more isolated.
jkmcf 5y ago
Heck, you don't even see people in the suburbs. People just drive right into their garages.
- j7ake 5y ago
  There is a short story I recall about aliens describing society on Earth and basically they describe a species that rolls on wheels and move on intricate highways. They make noises by honking, and all yield to flashing cars. If aliens visited USA they would likely conclude that the dominant species were these metal rolling objects moving around on paved roads.
  - marcus0x62 5y ago
    That sounds like the description of Ford Prefect’s arrival on earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
  - r00fus 5y ago
    This was the first issue of the Transformers comic series.
numpad0 5y ago
I don’t think cars itself is isolating people… I’ve heard passengers used to bring in fresh fruits on long distance trains and have nice chats with passengers adjacent, in mid-20th century. The plot of Fight Club, later in the century, also involves the idea of “single-serve friends” that protagonist make on domestic flights, that you make upon boarding and have good times over drinks, then part ways forever at the gate. Do people still do that? I bet I’d just be bothering them if I try to. You sit quiet and keep swiping, that’s the norm, especially when you have more strangers around.
Zababa 5y ago
I don't think the relationship between car-dependent infrastructure and meeting people holds. I live near the center of the city, and I take public transportation and walk to go to work. In 7 years of subway, I've never had a conversation with a stranger. I don't think I've ever seen someone have one either. I think I had one or two conversations with strangers in 5 years of bus, which is a bit better. I had more when walking (I'd say one every 6 months), but that's only when I'm not constrained on time, so at the end of work or on free days/the weekend. 95% of the time it's people asking for direction, all of those being something you could check on your phone (I know because that's how I'm able to answer them). I've never met someone that I talked to again this way. My university had no cars in it, and was wide. It was a great place to be, because cars and the infrastructure designed around them sucks. But outside of the people in my class (basically the equivalent of colleagues), I don't think I met anyone. On the other hand, car-dependent infrastructure strips the joy from life, in a way that makes life with them way more miserable, even if you don't use them. In my university, I could sit on grass, walk around without making sure I won't be killed by an incoming vehicle, appreciate the silence when most people were in class. Now I have to go through a car-heavy area to go to the office. My choice is either the big street with lots of cars, or the small streets with cars and a piss smell. At the university, I didn't mind being alone. In a way, a bit like in nature, even if alone you don't feel lonely when there are tree, grass and wide spaces around you. Now that I'm mostly in car-dominated areas, being alone is slightly more unbearable every day.
FigurativeVoid 5y ago
I was thinking about this the other day, and it really struck me how dehumanizing cars are. Look at road rage, I have seen some of the kindest people I know get absolutely furious at another person's driving. However, I don't think they would ever get that angry at another person if they were doing something else. They don't see a person; they see a car.
maccolgan 5y ago
>Parks, paths, stations, cafes, downtowns, and all the other free public spaces we used to use to meet with other people have been devastated by cars. I don't think you understand how and why people avoid these.
magicroot75 5y ago
Do you really meet them tho? Or do you just pass people glued to their iPhones?
- foxyv 5y ago
  I live in Texas so it may be a bit of an outlier, but yeah, you do actually meet people. Pet dogs, say hi, chat in the front yard, share a beer, throw a stray ball back to some kids, share gossip. Sometimes you know someone's name, sometimes they are just "that lady who runs every day in the park" or "The Donald Trump guy."

by foxyv 5y ago

acabal 5y ago

I completely agree, and I rant about this constantly. But in America at least, cars have infected society to such a degree that for the average person imagining life without them is totally impossible--like asking a fish to imagine life without water. "How would we get groceries?" they ask, and the thought of having a small grocery store within walking distance doesn't even occur to them, because walking is something they haven't done for their entire lives. Building a life of total car dependence in the 1940s-60s is IMHO one of the two great American mistakes of the 20th century, that by destroying local bonds between neighbors and strangers has led to America's current sense of deep, unspecific anxiety and lassitude on a societal level, and on an economic level has set the stage for the destruction of both small town and urban life that we've seen in the past 30 years.

asdff 5y ago
People still live car independently but oftentimes its not by choice. Commuting on the bus in LA I would see a lot of old men and women and immigrants who would come onto the bus with groceries or children in tow. That sort of lifestyle is already possible, but we only see people with no other choice in transportation riding the bus for the most part. If we want to convince people to leave the car behind and walk and take the bus to the grocery store, we have to improve the convenience argument of the bus vs. the car. For instance, my trip to costco is an hour on the bus or 20 minutes by car, due to having to transfer to another bus line and the bus being not very frequent, not to mention stuck in traffic. If the bus ran in its own lane and was a lot more frequent, travel time to costco would drop dramatically and might even beat the car commute if the car lanes are clogged with traffic and the bus is moving at full speed without stopping at red lights. It's not even a question of implementing expensive infrastructure like boring out a subway line. The bus lines in LA at least already go everywhere, but are so slow. Buy a few more busses, hire a few more operators, increase frequency dramatically to 5 minute headways all day, paint a lane and install a curb, set the lights to flick green when the bus is coming. Just doing that alone on major bus corridors would do so much good for improving quality of life in LA and be a model for cities around the world of how to incentivize transit in an area dominated by car modal share.
narrator 5y ago
The reason for a car dependent lifestyle in the U.S is that people don't want to live around or take public transit with the riffraff. This does not make sense to anyone who lives in Europe. Anyone who lives in a high crime city in the U.S who actually takes public transit knows what I'm talking about. Whether it's morally right or wrong, that's the reason America is set up the way it is.
- acabal 5y ago
  The reason for our car dependent lifestyle is that America was specifically and purposefully engineered that way during and after WW2. Pre-war, Americans had a rich urban and small town life much like Europe had and still has to an extent. The only reason we lost it was due to misguided urban planning, encouraged by lobbying from the auto industry.
  - r00fus 5y ago
    Who Framed Roger Rabbit essentially narrates this story of the demise of the trolley.
- ketzo 5y ago
  I mean, that's a chicken-and-egg thing. The more people who use public transit, the more resources get devoted to it, and the less it feels "trashy" or like a place for "riffraff". Conversely, the fewer people who use transit, the more grim it feels for those who do use it. The existence of public transit does not necessitate crime.
- null_object 5y ago
  > The reason for a car dependent lifestyle in the U.S is that people don't want to live around or take public transit with the riffraff. This does not make sense to anyone who lives in Europe. This sort of US vs Europe stuff I read on HN regarding car use just isn’t binary at all: some countries in Europe are very car-dependent, others less so. Not all of us are like The Netherlands or Denmark, unfortunately.
- Johnythree 5y ago
Noos 5y ago
except that the small grocery stores have poor selection, expensive prices, and are more inconvenient since you have to spend more time every day to get your things instead of shopping for the month. Some of us work long hours and don't have a wife who can spend the time to do things like that. Some of us know about both options, and a car is much better. People like cars because they are freedom; you are free to go where you want without relying on public transit schedules or the realization you have maybe a five mile radius of places you can walk to in an hour.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  The city I lived in before this had bodegas that had a decent selection, pretty much all the basics, and were not expensive. It was nice to be able to walk a couple blocks if you just needed a few ingredients. I and many others got a lot of the basics - beans, tortillas, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, spices - from there.
- foxyv 5y ago
  I remember the first time I got a car. It was definitely freeing. But mostly because I lived in a car dependent garbage town. Everything was miles apart and criss crossed by death roads where walkers and cyclists had to be on full alert to avoid getting smeared by someone driving on a sidewalk or coming out of a driveway backwards at 30 mph. I remember the first time I moved somewhere I didn't NEED a car to survive and it was AMAZING. All of a sudden the car went from being a source of freedom to an anchor. I didn't realize how much time, money, and pain went into owning one. Insurance, registration, fuel, parking, maintenance, stressful driving, terrible commutes, time consuming trips to a grocery store, TRAFFIC, planning meals a week at a time, worrying about where I parked it, designated drivers and getting fatter every day. Cars are just a pain. If you live in the middle of nowhere a car is the best thing in the world. It expands your access to everything. Living somewhere you don't need a car is is SO MUCH BETTER.
r00fus 5y ago
This really hit home for me when my sibling and I realized our aging mom was unfit to be able to drive. 4 accidents in a year meant unreasonable insurance premiums and replacement not to mention she was injured. Going car-free really hit her independence and for 2 years, she was aching to buy a car and get more mobile. It hurt me to see her like that but I couldn't let her get behind a wheel again despite her constant complaints. Nowadays she's mostly adjusted using Lyft/Uber to go to the doctor or visit family but walking to see friends and go shopping (walk score for her place is very decent). The impact to her self-esteem hasn't quite recovered yet. Society in general even for an older individual places a LOT of worth on us being "drivers" - popular media reinforces it (just listen and you'll get tons of car references in pop music and movies). I wish she could move to somewhere like France where this isn't the case, but that ship sailed quite a few years ago.

swayvil 5y ago

Vast widescale poverty might cure this social ailment. Seriously. Like the monks say, "my poverty is my shield".

dandellion 5y ago

I don't think cars are that big of a factor, but rather how pretty much everything that could be automated has been. I live in a small town in southern Europe, and I rarely need to talk to more than four or five people in any normal week, and those conversations are usually pretty short. I can work remotely, buy necessities and pay for them without talking to anybody, do taxes, etc. I sometimes have to talk with the neighbours, plumber or my doctor, but those are pretty rare. Considering how easy it is to do everything I need with almost no interactions, I'm not surprised people are becoming more isolated.

jkmcf 5y ago

Heck, you don't even see people in the suburbs. People just drive right into their garages.

j7ake 5y ago
There is a short story I recall about aliens describing society on Earth and basically they describe a species that rolls on wheels and move on intricate highways. They make noises by honking, and all yield to flashing cars. If aliens visited USA they would likely conclude that the dominant species were these metal rolling objects moving around on paved roads.
- marcus0x62 5y ago
  That sounds like the description of Ford Prefect’s arrival on earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
- r00fus 5y ago
  This was the first issue of the Transformers comic series.

numpad0 5y ago

I don’t think cars itself is isolating people… I’ve heard passengers used to bring in fresh fruits on long distance trains and have nice chats with passengers adjacent, in mid-20th century. The plot of Fight Club, later in the century, also involves the idea of “single-serve friends” that protagonist make on domestic flights, that you make upon boarding and have good times over drinks, then part ways forever at the gate. Do people still do that? I bet I’d just be bothering them if I try to. You sit quiet and keep swiping, that’s the norm, especially when you have more strangers around.

Zababa 5y ago

I don't think the relationship between car-dependent infrastructure and meeting people holds. I live near the center of the city, and I take public transportation and walk to go to work. In 7 years of subway, I've never had a conversation with a stranger. I don't think I've ever seen someone have one either. I think I had one or two conversations with strangers in 5 years of bus, which is a bit better. I had more when walking (I'd say one every 6 months), but that's only when I'm not constrained on time, so at the end of work or on free days/the weekend. 95% of the time it's people asking for direction, all of those being something you could check on your phone (I know because that's how I'm able to answer them). I've never met someone that I talked to again this way. My university had no cars in it, and was wide. It was a great place to be, because cars and the infrastructure designed around them sucks. But outside of the people in my class (basically the equivalent of colleagues), I don't think I met anyone. On the other hand, car-dependent infrastructure strips the joy from life, in a way that makes life with them way more miserable, even if you don't use them. In my university, I could sit on grass, walk around without making sure I won't be killed by an incoming vehicle, appreciate the silence when most people were in class. Now I have to go through a car-heavy area to go to the office. My choice is either the big street with lots of cars, or the small streets with cars and a piss smell. At the university, I didn't mind being alone. In a way, a bit like in nature, even if alone you don't feel lonely when there are tree, grass and wide spaces around you. Now that I'm mostly in car-dominated areas, being alone is slightly more unbearable every day.

FigurativeVoid 5y ago

I was thinking about this the other day, and it really struck me how dehumanizing cars are. Look at road rage, I have seen some of the kindest people I know get absolutely furious at another person's driving. However, I don't think they would ever get that angry at another person if they were doing something else. They don't see a person; they see a car.

maccolgan 5y ago

>Parks, paths, stations, cafes, downtowns, and all the other free public spaces we used to use to meet with other people have been devastated by cars. I don't think you understand how and why people avoid these.

magicroot75 5y ago

Do you really meet them tho? Or do you just pass people glued to their iPhones?

foxyv 5y ago
I live in Texas so it may be a bit of an outlier, but yeah, you do actually meet people. Pet dogs, say hi, chat in the front yard, share a beer, throw a stray ball back to some kids, share gossip. Sometimes you know someone's name, sometimes they are just "that lady who runs every day in the park" or "The Donald Trump guy."