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It's such a shame. The automobile is built as a requirement to live in society rather than something that complement and argumented our lifestyle.
by kiba 13y ago
It's such a shame. The automobile is built as a requirement to live in society rather than something that complement and argumented our lifestyle.
- bdcravens 13y agoThe same could be said of telephones and the Internet.
- the_cat_kittles 13y agowhich dont kill people in quite the same way
- bdcravens 13y agoThe lethality of cars had nothing to do with the point I was responding to.
- Gracana 13y agoIt didn't? What were they calling a shame, then?
- Dylan16807 13y ago"The automobile is built as a requirement to live in society rather than something that complement and argumented our lifestyle."
- lmm 13y agoWhich is a problem precisely because cars are so dangerous.
- Dylan16807 13y agoEven if they weren't dangerous, it's a shame that cars are so forced and that it's so hard to walk around in many areas.
- _delirium 13y agoReally depends on where you live, but unfortunately true for much of the U.S. and Canada. Not true in the biggest North American city (NYC), though. Also not true in much of Europe.
- saraid216 13y agoEurope generally resisted the authoritarianism of the car, and lashed back against it fairly strongly. In the US, many cities were literally gutted in favor of making sure cars could move fast. Then we started designing with the assumption that anyone worth caring about had a car.
- _delirium 13y agoI wonder to what extent some of that is a fortunate combination of circumstances. Many European countries were quite positive on highways in the mid 20th century. But city centers mostly escaped having American-style freeways bulldozed through them, I think out of urban-preservation reasons more than anti-car or pro-transit sentiment. Same reason NYC ended up finally pushing back on Robert Moses's plans. So the freeways mostly stopped at the edges. At the height of the uncontrolled car-ification of Copenhagen in the '70s the place was totally crawling with automobiles to the exclusion of other modalities, though. It's pretty weird to look at some photos from that era, with car traffic taking up almost the whole width of narrow streets in the city center, pedestrians confined to narrow ledge-like sidewalks, and bikes either absent or trying their luck in traffic. Now most of those streets have been either pedestrianized, turned into mixed-traffic, low-speed "living streets", or had the roads narrowed to one lane to make room for bike lanes and/or wider sidewalks.
- lookACamel 13y agoMight you link to some of those photos for the curious?
- crazy1van 13y ago"Really depends on where you live, but unfortunately true for much of the U.S. and Canada" What is unfortunate about this? Americans on average are so rich that most of them can afford a car that allows them to both live where they want and still get to the job they want even if those two places are tens of miles apart and there is no public transportation. Sounds terrible.