5 ms·

Based on the comments in here (and on related stories) I think the US transportation conversation needs to change in some way. Mostly, it's a lot of people com

by wilg 4y ago

Based on the comments in here (and on related stories) I think the US transportation conversation needs to change in some way. Mostly, it's a lot of people complaining about cars. Which is fine, I mostly agree. But the anti-car stuff is becoming extremely toxic and parroting half-remembered tweets about induced demand, finding slightly different ways to describe cars as death machines, and good old-fashioned liberal American self-flagellation. We're past the point where it's transgressive to point out the problems with cars, we need to actually have some kind of a sensible discussion that involves practical considerations. In particular, anti-car people need to have a good handle on why people actually like cars. Otherwise, it'll just be more of trying to punish people, like the guy in this thread who says "the key to this morass to make car owners suffer". We've got to do better than that!

kohidavez 4y ago
Yea! Won’t someone finally think about the cars?
- wilg 4y ago
  This is an example of the toxic bullshit I'm unhappy with.
actionablefiber 4y ago
One major issue is that if you as an individual attempt to go car-free, the resulting lifestyle makes cars into such an incredible intrusion into your daily life that it is hard not to become more radicalized. That has been my story at least. My bus is late and slow, because it's stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic from all these people driving motor vehicles with a single occupant. I need ear protection on my commute because the 14th Street Bridge into DC pairs pedestrians and cyclists side-by-side with 60mph motor traffic with no noise protections. I lost a day at work because I got hit on my bike by a truck driver who was on his phone, and had to go to the ER. I am shaken and my heart rate is pounding and I am pondering my own mortality because someone gunned their engine through a left turn while I was walking across the street with a pedestrian signal - they accelerated instead of stopping to yield and I had to jump out of the way to save my own life while they sped off. If you recognize how awful cars are for the environment and how they make city life inconvenient, unpleasant and expensive, and so you make the personal decision to forgo them to be part of the solution rather than the problem, you are taking a step into a life that will nudge you more and more to truly despise motor vehicles because your daily life will be filled with only negative interactions with them.
- wilg 4y ago
  Do you feel you're gaining a lot by subjecting yourself to this situation?
  - actionablefiber 4y ago
    Quite a lot. I save a lot of money - my monthly transportation cost is some two-digit number even after including the occasional weekend trip to other cities - most of which I squirrel away and some of which I spend on other things; I am always in excellent physical shape; I have a deep knowledge of the metro, bus, bikeshare, trail and bike lane systems around the DC metro area and spend a lot of time using low-stress separated infrastructure; I go anywhere in the city anytime I want without ever having to think about parking, tolls, gas or congestion. The drawback, if you can call it that, is that I am radically anti-car, as a direct result of the lived experiences that that life gives me.
    - wilg 4y ago
      Cool, that's a good pitch for not owning a car, and sounds great! My issue is not with people who are anti-car, but with people who cannot understand why other people have different priorities and who make different trade-offs. That's key to building a better world.
      - actionablefiber 4y ago
        > My issue is not with people who are anti-car, but with people who cannot understand why other people have different priorities and who make different trade-offs. A lot to say here for why I think the number of people who can legitimately claim it is a morally neutral matter of priorities and trade-offs for them is small. For one, there are stigmas around transit and biking. Funnily enough they are contradictory: that only the poor get around with transit and biking, and that only upper class elitists get around with transit and biking. It is extremely common for people to oppose new infrastructure or denser housing on the grounds that it will either A) cause "undesirables" to come to the neighborhood and destroy property values, or B) induce gentrification. For two, for a lot of people, living car-centrically is an automatic habit because it was a deeply ingrained assumption all throughout their upbringing that you just need a car and that owning a car is an important rite of passage and social signifier in adulthood. For three, lots of people who were steeped in driving growing up are intimidated by the thought of learning to navigate a transit system or learning to ride a bike. The last and to me most important thing is that the politics of car dependency are destructive to everyone. It is a negative-sum game to widen all the highways, and increase all the parking minimums, and zone for low density, and block bike lanes. It is extremely wasteful in terms of public resources and environmental destruction and it harms everyone's quality of life. A lot of people don't really grasp the danger and unpleasantness that their car imposes on others. Seeing, smelling, hearing, tiptoeing around motor vehicle traffic are all deeply unpleasant and you have to place an enormous amount of trust in motor vehicle operators not to kill you where you stand. This is one thing that makes me not sympathetic to the "different priorities and trade-offs" argument. The internal logic is about pros and cons to one's own self, not about the pros and cons to everyone else, and motor vehicles have many properties that put this in stark relief: they are getting bigger and heavier making them safer to the driver and more deadly to whoever they hit; their horns are loud enough to cause ear damage and cause a giant fright to bystanders but are muffled inside the cabin; and of course huge, huge tracts of even walkable cities like NY are dedicated to motor vehicle traffic with many lanes while people walking, biking, scootering, dining outdoors and so on are forced to fight for scraps of space at the margin. For me living without a car is not just about the benefits it offers to me personally but also the full understanding of the harms to others I am refusing to inflict, or even run the risk of inflicting, by opting out.
GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
Put another way: "sensible discussion" is the reason why the US is stuck with car-dependent sprawl. The practical considerations were decided decades ago, and have been cargo culted into every facet of US urban and suburban design. Cars are the designated post-hoc rationalization for an environment that is almost exclusively built for them. If the "transgressive" tone of the conversation is the only takeaway you have, then perhaps you are not listening closely enough.
- wilg 4y ago
  This is exactly the type of pseudo-intellectual crap that I'm trying to wade through. You're trying to present the argument in exactly the same way I'm objecting to, like you're opening my eyes that I'm in the Matrix. That it's surprising or interesting to learn that the US is built around cars in many ways, and that's affecting my thinking such that I could not consider that cars are bad. Maybe I need to "listen" more closely, like I can't understand the secrets of the world that you are privy to. This is all intellectually dishonest masturbatory fluff.
  - GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
    > This is word salad Is there anything you'd like me to clarify further for you?
    - wilg 4y ago
      I edited my post.
    - pxmpxm 4y ago
      It's not the ability comprehend what you wrote, but rather the content - the point you're making is the same cliche white-kid-from-the-suburbs-moves-to-a-city infallible argument ("you only need cars because the system makes you want cars"). There's decades of revealed preference for larger, more private housing, rather than density and mass transit, and that dynamic strongly correlates to income. Median household income in the states is nearly double of said demographic's mecca, the Netherlands, and I would bet my lunch money that car ownership and utilisation there goes up with income as well. So relatively dense places with relatively poor-er population will optimize towards mass transit and biking and what not, because people can't afford cars and larger houses to begin with.
nayuki 4y ago
I don't think so; the emergent urbanism conversation is a step in the right direction. The anti-car stuff is extremely toxic because a large segment of society refuses to listen. Induced demand is how every lane-widening project is a huge money sink while failing to deliver on the promise of reduced congestion. You think complaining about death machines is comparable to the thousands of people inside and outside of cars who have near-death experiences every day due to cars? Or people losing autonomy and dignity by losing the ability to drive is not toxic? These topics have been politely brushed under the rug for too long. Is it wrong for disenfranchised people to express their frustration? Are they required to empathize and understand their abusers? Sensible solutions? They've been put forth ad nauseum already. Ending single-family exclusive zoning. Enabling mixed residential-commercial areas. Reducing commute distances. Funding public mass transit. Ending parking minimums. Tolling roads and mileage. Recognizing that roads are overbuilt and there is not enough tax base to maintain them. Anti-car people know very well why people like cars. The dominant culture is kind of hard to ignore. The most common reasons are a sense of autonomy, the fact that working and doing errands without a car will increase travel time by several multiples, and the fact that it's a comfortable norm that almost everybody has accepted (can't go wrong with the herd right?).
- joenot443 4y ago
  > You think complaining about death machines is comparable to the thousands of people inside and outside of cars who have near-death experiences every day due to cars? This is a wildly uncharitable and disingenuous reading of their comment. I stopped reading yours at that point, I'm sure you can do better.
  - nayuki 4y ago
    How am I being wildly uncharitable and disingenuous? The post I was replying to said: > the anti-car stuff is becoming extremely toxic and [...] finding slightly different ways to describe cars as death machines I'm refuting the complaint about the anti-car conversation being extremely toxic because the reality of car-dominant culture is toxic. If you stopped reading my comment, aren't you choosing polarization over reconciliation? Want to see toxic? Here are a couple of posts plucked from the r/FuckCars front page: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/128yjd9/i_just_want_to_walk_in_my_neighborhood/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/128yjd9/i_just_wa... - The norm of cars parked on and blocking the sidewalk. Do pedestrians and wheelchair users not have rights? https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1291pfo/my_foot_got_stuck_on_the_pedal/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1291pfo/my_foot_g... - Car-ped collision, driver brushes it off as "oops wrong pedal". https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/128qx21/cue_the_parking_lot_full_of_useless_egotanks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/128qx21/cue_the_p... - Employee gets hassled for storing bike at workplace, no such treatment for storing a car. https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/129iogc/for_the_past_2_months_this_subway_exit_is_closed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/129iogc/for_the_p... - One driver having an accident inconveniences many thousands of people. Is this not a lopsided power structure? Car culture is the dominant default. It's too easy to brush off non-drivers' problems as trivial and not worth solving.
slifin 4y ago
As someone who dislikes cars or let's say dislikes the fact there's no other choice I know exactly why people like cars, because I was one, I grew up playing with toy cars, micro machines, garages, play mat with roads, Sim city for car planning, building cars in Lego, playing need for speed, gran turismo, midnight club run, mad max, grand theft auto, truck simulator, watching Tokyo drift Cars are everywhere in our culture, huge bits of car infrastructure like traffic lights and roads that run for miles that just connect to a shed are completely normal The bigger problem for us "anti car" people is that it's so ingrained that people no longer see or care about the determental aspect of car dominance People look at horrific crashes like a car wedged on a side of a building and they dismiss it as a driver problem They look at traffic jams and they look at it as an other person problem They look in their neighbourhood and don't notice that their kids can't safely play in their neighbourhood and then wonder why they're glued to phones The problem we have is recognition first and foremost then it's education, YouTubers not just bikes and strong towns do an amazing job of that

by wilg 4y ago

kohidavez 4y ago

Yea! Won’t someone finally think about the cars?

wilg 4y ago
This is an example of the toxic bullshit I'm unhappy with.

actionablefiber 4y ago

One major issue is that if you as an individual attempt to go car-free, the resulting lifestyle makes cars into such an incredible intrusion into your daily life that it is hard not to become more radicalized. That has been my story at least. My bus is late and slow, because it's stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic from all these people driving motor vehicles with a single occupant. I need ear protection on my commute because the 14th Street Bridge into DC pairs pedestrians and cyclists side-by-side with 60mph motor traffic with no noise protections. I lost a day at work because I got hit on my bike by a truck driver who was on his phone, and had to go to the ER. I am shaken and my heart rate is pounding and I am pondering my own mortality because someone gunned their engine through a left turn while I was walking across the street with a pedestrian signal - they accelerated instead of stopping to yield and I had to jump out of the way to save my own life while they sped off. If you recognize how awful cars are for the environment and how they make city life inconvenient, unpleasant and expensive, and so you make the personal decision to forgo them to be part of the solution rather than the problem, you are taking a step into a life that will nudge you more and more to truly despise motor vehicles because your daily life will be filled with only negative interactions with them.

wilg 4y ago
Do you feel you're gaining a lot by subjecting yourself to this situation?
- actionablefiber 4y ago
  Quite a lot. I save a lot of money - my monthly transportation cost is some two-digit number even after including the occasional weekend trip to other cities - most of which I squirrel away and some of which I spend on other things; I am always in excellent physical shape; I have a deep knowledge of the metro, bus, bikeshare, trail and bike lane systems around the DC metro area and spend a lot of time using low-stress separated infrastructure; I go anywhere in the city anytime I want without ever having to think about parking, tolls, gas or congestion. The drawback, if you can call it that, is that I am radically anti-car, as a direct result of the lived experiences that that life gives me.
  - wilg 4y ago
    Cool, that's a good pitch for not owning a car, and sounds great! My issue is not with people who are anti-car, but with people who cannot understand why other people have different priorities and who make different trade-offs. That's key to building a better world.
    - actionablefiber 4y ago
      > My issue is not with people who are anti-car, but with people who cannot understand why other people have different priorities and who make different trade-offs. A lot to say here for why I think the number of people who can legitimately claim it is a morally neutral matter of priorities and trade-offs for them is small. For one, there are stigmas around transit and biking. Funnily enough they are contradictory: that only the poor get around with transit and biking, and that only upper class elitists get around with transit and biking. It is extremely common for people to oppose new infrastructure or denser housing on the grounds that it will either A) cause "undesirables" to come to the neighborhood and destroy property values, or B) induce gentrification. For two, for a lot of people, living car-centrically is an automatic habit because it was a deeply ingrained assumption all throughout their upbringing that you just need a car and that owning a car is an important rite of passage and social signifier in adulthood. For three, lots of people who were steeped in driving growing up are intimidated by the thought of learning to navigate a transit system or learning to ride a bike. The last and to me most important thing is that the politics of car dependency are destructive to everyone. It is a negative-sum game to widen all the highways, and increase all the parking minimums, and zone for low density, and block bike lanes. It is extremely wasteful in terms of public resources and environmental destruction and it harms everyone's quality of life. A lot of people don't really grasp the danger and unpleasantness that their car imposes on others. Seeing, smelling, hearing, tiptoeing around motor vehicle traffic are all deeply unpleasant and you have to place an enormous amount of trust in motor vehicle operators not to kill you where you stand. This is one thing that makes me not sympathetic to the "different priorities and trade-offs" argument. The internal logic is about pros and cons to one's own self, not about the pros and cons to everyone else, and motor vehicles have many properties that put this in stark relief: they are getting bigger and heavier making them safer to the driver and more deadly to whoever they hit; their horns are loud enough to cause ear damage and cause a giant fright to bystanders but are muffled inside the cabin; and of course huge, huge tracts of even walkable cities like NY are dedicated to motor vehicle traffic with many lanes while people walking, biking, scootering, dining outdoors and so on are forced to fight for scraps of space at the margin. For me living without a car is not just about the benefits it offers to me personally but also the full understanding of the harms to others I am refusing to inflict, or even run the risk of inflicting, by opting out.

GaryNumanVevo 4y ago

Put another way: "sensible discussion" is the reason why the US is stuck with car-dependent sprawl. The practical considerations were decided decades ago, and have been cargo culted into every facet of US urban and suburban design. Cars are the designated post-hoc rationalization for an environment that is almost exclusively built for them. If the "transgressive" tone of the conversation is the only takeaway you have, then perhaps you are not listening closely enough.

wilg 4y ago
This is exactly the type of pseudo-intellectual crap that I'm trying to wade through. You're trying to present the argument in exactly the same way I'm objecting to, like you're opening my eyes that I'm in the Matrix. That it's surprising or interesting to learn that the US is built around cars in many ways, and that's affecting my thinking such that I could not consider that cars are bad. Maybe I need to "listen" more closely, like I can't understand the secrets of the world that you are privy to. This is all intellectually dishonest masturbatory fluff.
- GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
  > This is word salad Is there anything you'd like me to clarify further for you?
  - wilg 4y ago
    I edited my post.
  - pxmpxm 4y ago
    It's not the ability comprehend what you wrote, but rather the content - the point you're making is the same cliche white-kid-from-the-suburbs-moves-to-a-city infallible argument ("you only need cars because the system makes you want cars"). There's decades of revealed preference for larger, more private housing, rather than density and mass transit, and that dynamic strongly correlates to income. Median household income in the states is nearly double of said demographic's mecca, the Netherlands, and I would bet my lunch money that car ownership and utilisation there goes up with income as well. So relatively dense places with relatively poor-er population will optimize towards mass transit and biking and what not, because people can't afford cars and larger houses to begin with.

nayuki 4y ago

I don't think so; the emergent urbanism conversation is a step in the right direction. The anti-car stuff is extremely toxic because a large segment of society refuses to listen. Induced demand is how every lane-widening project is a huge money sink while failing to deliver on the promise of reduced congestion. You think complaining about death machines is comparable to the thousands of people inside and outside of cars who have near-death experiences every day due to cars? Or people losing autonomy and dignity by losing the ability to drive is not toxic? These topics have been politely brushed under the rug for too long. Is it wrong for disenfranchised people to express their frustration? Are they required to empathize and understand their abusers? Sensible solutions? They've been put forth ad nauseum already. Ending single-family exclusive zoning. Enabling mixed residential-commercial areas. Reducing commute distances. Funding public mass transit. Ending parking minimums. Tolling roads and mileage. Recognizing that roads are overbuilt and there is not enough tax base to maintain them. Anti-car people know very well why people like cars. The dominant culture is kind of hard to ignore. The most common reasons are a sense of autonomy, the fact that working and doing errands without a car will increase travel time by several multiples, and the fact that it's a comfortable norm that almost everybody has accepted (can't go wrong with the herd right?).

joenot443 4y ago
> You think complaining about death machines is comparable to the thousands of people inside and outside of cars who have near-death experiences every day due to cars? This is a wildly uncharitable and disingenuous reading of their comment. I stopped reading yours at that point, I'm sure you can do better.
- nayuki 4y ago
  How am I being wildly uncharitable and disingenuous? The post I was replying to said: > the anti-car stuff is becoming extremely toxic and [...] finding slightly different ways to describe cars as death machines I'm refuting the complaint about the anti-car conversation being extremely toxic because the reality of car-dominant culture is toxic. If you stopped reading my comment, aren't you choosing polarization over reconciliation? Want to see toxic? Here are a couple of posts plucked from the r/FuckCars front page: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/128yjd9/i_just_want_to_walk_in_my_neighborhood/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/128yjd9/i_just_wa... - The norm of cars parked on and blocking the sidewalk. Do pedestrians and wheelchair users not have rights? https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1291pfo/my_foot_got_stuck_on_the_pedal/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1291pfo/my_foot_g... - Car-ped collision, driver brushes it off as "oops wrong pedal". https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/128qx21/cue_the_parking_lot_full_of_useless_egotanks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/128qx21/cue_the_p... - Employee gets hassled for storing bike at workplace, no such treatment for storing a car. https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/129iogc/for_the_past_2_months_this_subway_exit_is_closed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/129iogc/for_the_p... - One driver having an accident inconveniences many thousands of people. Is this not a lopsided power structure? Car culture is the dominant default. It's too easy to brush off non-drivers' problems as trivial and not worth solving.

slifin 4y ago

As someone who dislikes cars or let's say dislikes the fact there's no other choice I know exactly why people like cars, because I was one, I grew up playing with toy cars, micro machines, garages, play mat with roads, Sim city for car planning, building cars in Lego, playing need for speed, gran turismo, midnight club run, mad max, grand theft auto, truck simulator, watching Tokyo drift Cars are everywhere in our culture, huge bits of car infrastructure like traffic lights and roads that run for miles that just connect to a shed are completely normal The bigger problem for us "anti car" people is that it's so ingrained that people no longer see or care about the determental aspect of car dominance People look at horrific crashes like a car wedged on a side of a building and they dismiss it as a driver problem They look at traffic jams and they look at it as an other person problem They look in their neighbourhood and don't notice that their kids can't safely play in their neighbourhood and then wonder why they're glued to phones The problem we have is recognition first and foremost then it's education, YouTubers not just bikes and strong towns do an amazing job of that