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Yes exactly. Let's simplify it to the individualist vs collectivist spectrum. Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geo
by anon84873628 6mo ago
Yes exactly. Let's simplify it to the individualist vs collectivist spectrum.
Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).
In the car centric places, a few generations later they become an indelible aspect of nature. It is impossible for most people to imagine society working otherwise. And even when they do, the collective action problems are near insurmountable. The introduction of technology has irreversibly trapped us in a way of thinking we can't escape.
This is exactly the premise of the Amish religion. You must strictly control technology to create the society you want, not the other way around.
- CamperBob2 6mo agoThe thing is, the Amish don't try to tell the rest of the world that their way is the "obviously correct" way and that everybody else is doing it wrong, the way anti-personal mobility advocates do.
- the13 6mo agoTHIS. But the car/oil companies did do bad things like work to undermine public transport & EVs back in day. Now we have sprawling burbs & social isolation. Phones, death of 3rd spaces & church going, etc. made it worse as people stopped having bigger families, leading to even more isolation.
- tikhonj 6mo agoIt's the folks pushing cars that are both the most strident and the most successful at pushing their "obviously correct" way onto everyone, at least in the US.
- Negitivefrags 6mo agoCars are not popular becuase people pushed them. Cars are popular because the utility is undeniable. This is true for any kind of transformative technology. Marketing and lobbying can only get you so far. If something has enough utility, it will be used regardless of what people say they want.
- ryandrake 6mo ago> Cars are not popular becuase people pushed them. Cars are popular because the utility is undeniable. I think this is somewhat of a chicken and egg problem. Cars' utility is undeniable partially because society has twisted itself thoroughly around The Car being an assumed part of it. This societal change was both pulled (by car customers) and pushed (by car manufacturers).
- macNchz 6mo agoYes absolutely—I think cars have obvious utility as machines, but there has now been 100 years of building everything around them and changing laws in such a way that encourages their use: through direct and indirect subsidy, land use rules that largely outlaw building cities in any way other than sprawl that itself increases the importance and utility of cars, and various other preferential regulations that often tolerate the harms in a way that is not applied elsewhere (c.f. panic over e-bike safety vs American highway safety overall).
- coderenegade 6mo agoCars won because they were (and are) better than the alternatives. The need for powerful individual transportation with utility has always existed, and was originally met with horses. Bicycles meet the transportation need, but not the need for utility. Cars do both, and they do it better than anything else. Even before fueling infrastructure was rolled out, you could still run a car on petroleum you bought from the chemist, which is still infinitely better than the acres of pasture you need for horses. If you had an early diesel, it would run on oil, which is even easier. The idea that cars needed all this infrastructure that other alternatives didn't just doesn't match the reality of the history of the automobile. And yes, we've leaned on those advantages in the century since, which has also created vast areas where a car is necessary to participate in society, but we only did so because the advantages and utility were so undeniable.
- anon84873628 6mo ago[dead]
- skrtskrt 6mo ago“Anti-personal mobility” is beyond absurd, absolute loony-bin stuff. “Anti-personal mobility advocates” do not exist. Transit advocates exist, and improvements in transit also massively benefit those who need to or prefer to drive.
- ButlerianJihad 6mo agoMost motorists absolutely hate e-scooters and e-bikes. They hate them with a white-hot passion. You will never see more road rage than against a scooter when I ride it in a traffic lane. The scooter goes about 17mph, and with 3+ traffic lanes available to cars, they will pile up behind a scooter, scream out their open windows, honk and cut me off, and spit in my face: yes literally spit all over my face, because they hate personal mobility so much. Motorists hate anything that isn't a car and is in their way. Motorists hate Critical Mass; they hate light rail or streetcars that hog their rights-of-way; they hate pedestrians (especially when pedestrians aren't wearing the right clothes); they hate Lyft, Uber, and Waymo especially; they hate big trucks and they hate Amish people with horse-drawn buggies. Motorists will establish coalitions to vote against public transit measures in their home towns. They have come out in City Council and other public meetings, to protest and rail, so to speak, to rail against the expansion of light rail into their neighborhoods, because not only do they hate the construction, but they hate the "type of people" that light rail brings, and ultimately they hate the gentrification that comes from a fixed-route project that will ultimately close their shitty exploitive businesses and replace them with more elevated exploitation and richer moguls.
- skrtskrt 6mo agoI assumed comment is referring to people that advocate for transit as “anti-personal mobility”, they are counting cars as the only “personal mobility” which is beyond laughable.
- nonameiguess 6mo agoe-scooters kind of sit in an uncanny valley of shittiness. I'll upfront say it's not at all fair to anyone using them responsibly, but there's a lot of cultural baggage that is going to make them uniquely reviled compared to alternatives. For instance, I've longboarded all around the city of Dallas for years and nobody has ever honked at, cut me off, or spit on me. But temporary rental scooters with no permanent docking station carry with them the stigma of: - People riding them on sidewalks to putting pedestrians in danger - "Parking" them right in front of someone's gate, blocking the entrance to their house - Obviously drunk partiers using them in lieu of getting a ride or taking the bus - Groups of them sitting around half knocked over completely blocking a sidewalk or other pathway meant for cyclists, runners, walkers, and other pedestrians Fair or not, you're like the kid using a razor scooter at the skate park. Nobody likes you but it doesn't mean they hate everyone at the skate park. They just hate scooter kids.
- jimbokun 6mo agoRobustly advocating for your opinions is not an act of oppression. The advocates of the automobile have been far, far more successful at shaping US society, laws, culture and our physical environment. I imagine that’s also true in many other nations to a lesser extent.
- CamperBob2 6mo agoAnd at some point, maybe it makes sense to ask why, instead of blindly accepting and propagating the hive-mind party line exhibited in threads such as this one.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- anon84873628 6mo agoI don't think a armonster was quite claiming it to be "obviously correct". But rather taking it for granted that this a valid hypothesis: - We would have gotten most of the social utility of automobiles, without most of the social negatives, if personal vehicles had mostly never happened. And implied from that, we should stop having them now. Given the known ills of society, I think those negatives are pretty uncontroversial. To the point that personal car proponents have some burden to explain why we should keep it up.
- 121789 6mo agoit is kind of hilarious to hear people just keep making the same arguments as ted kaczynski
- ButlerianJihad 6mo agoNeither Ted Kaczynski nor Senator McCarthy were wrong, even if we can criticize their ways and means.
- eschaton 6mo agoCrazy that someone would use this pseudonym while at the same time saying that all society's problems are caused by socialist and Communist conspiracy.
- ButlerianJihad 6mo ago[flagged]
- KPGv2 6mo agowhat was Senator McCarthy right about?
- zshrdlu 6mo agoTed Kaczynski specifically was advocating for primitivity, no?
- only-one1701 6mo agoYou mean the brilliant mathematician with the correct insights into the modern American condition?
- adolph 6mo ago> Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads). Something I recently learned about roads from Stewart Brand's new book "Maintenance" is that the first groups pushing for paved roads were cyclists: The Good Roads Movement of the late 19th century began as a grass-roots crusade to improve roads for bicyclists. By the 20th century, it had turned into a national effort embraced by the automobile industry, railroad tycoons and presidents. https://www.governing.com/context/how-gilded-age-bicyclists-paved-the-way-for-the-modern-highway-system https://www.governing.com/context/how-gilded-age-bicyclists-...