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America has had a robust car culture for over 80 years. The obsession over safety is more recent. Stop trying to make everything about cars.
by wyager 4y ago
America has had a robust car culture for over 80 years. The obsession over safety is more recent. Stop trying to make everything about cars.
- woodruffw 4y agoI think you missed the point: the claim was that the obsession over safety (partially the kind that manifests in cases like this) is the culmination of a robust car culture. Things like this obviously don't happen overnight; they require decades of normalization (and, for car culture in particular, alienation).
- wyager 4y agoI can think of a lot of (historically) recent changes in the American environment that are more alienating than cars.
- woodruffw 4y agoSo can I, but I can't think of many that share the magnitude and ubiquity of cars! (You shouldn't read this as a fixation or totem: there are plenty of other problems in this country. But it isn't a coincidence that aggressive deurbanization/suburbanization is closely tracked by increases in isolation, which in turn is tracked by a decline in personal trust[1].) [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/the-state-of-personal-trust/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/the-state-of...
- wyager 4y agoI can: the destruction of religion as a civic activity in the US. I'm not even religious but that's a huge one. Another is the effort (by HUD and others) to eliminate regions of ethno-cultural homogeneity. Both of these are A) much more numerically significant (on a per-capita basis) than changes in vehicle use since, say, 1950 and B) well-understood to reduce social factors like trust and cohesion.
- hgsgm 4y agoFear of "Drug dealers and sex offenders" isn't a car culture problem. A rapist can follow you to your apartment door.
- woodruffw 4y agoThis is exactly my point: "drug dealers and sex offenders" are on your mind, despite the US being an overwhelmingly safe and criminally uneventful place. Car culture encourages fixation on crime and risk, even when all available evidence points to the US being a radically safer place than it was even 30 years ago[1]. We're still not a safe country on an absolute scale (relative to our economic and social peers), but our cultural histrionics around crime are unsupported by the actual trendline. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/57581270 https://www.bbc.com/news/57581270
- insane_dreamer 4y agoI agree our social histronics around crime are quite irrational. But I think the problem is primarily rooted in the media, not car culture.
- woodruffw 4y agoThe two are intertwined! "If it bleeds, it leads" works especially well on low-trust societies, and car culture enables and enforces low-trust social growth. Put another way: the media might be a primary driver of the problem, but American culture is uniquely susceptible to it because of car dependence and the cultural/demographic structures that dependence incentivizes.
- Tade0 4y ago> US being an overwhelmingly safe and criminally uneventful place. Just the homicide rate in the US is unbecoming of a developed country.
- wyager 4y agoWorth noting that US homicide is highly localized. Certain cities/regions represent a vastly disproportionate fraction.