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> Young people never wanted to spend their lives in cars. Actually, many of them did. Talk to some old people in the US suburbs about what life was like when t
by pjlegato 11y ago
> Young people never wanted to spend their lives in cars.
Actually, many of them did. Talk to some old people in the US suburbs about what life was like when they were young in the '50s and '60s. Most grew up in a dense city and then voluntarily left it for the suburbs. Most of them thought spending their life in a car was great -- certainly way better than having to take the bus or the train. It was a sign of success. When cars went mass-market as America suburbanized, densely built urban areas and the use of public transport were increasingly associated with poverty and being trapped in the archaic past.
If you lived in the suburbs and commuted by car, it was prestigious, it was modern; it meant you were doing well for yourself financially, and were forward-looking to a brighter future with new and better ways of doing things. It was the 1950s cultural equivalent of working at a startup and living in a gentrifying hipster neighborhood in San Francisco today.
No doubt someone will reply that these perceptions was all manufactured merely due to General Motors malfeasance and marketing campaigns. That may be true, but that's entirely beside the point. Those campaigns worked because many young people then actually did agree with their content, and were very happy to drive everywhere.
- tsotha 11y ago>Most of them thought spending their life in a car was great -- certainly way better than having to take the bus or the train. It was a sign of success. You're overstating that quite a bit. Sure, driving for twenty minutes beats taking public transportation. But sitting in stop and go traffic for a couple hours every day is awful and people always realized it.
- turar 11y agoHow much stop and go traffic was there in the 50s?
- tsotha 11y agoI don't know about the 50s, but by the sixties traffic was as bad in some places as it is today. Traffic in Southern California, where I grew up, is actually better today than it was in the 70s.
- dredmorbius 11y agoThat's about when it started getting bad. The term "Sig Alert", for an unplanned lane closure, originated in LA in 1955. It takes its name from Loyd C. "Sig" Sigmon, who created a radio-based notification system for the California Highway Patrol: Sigmon developed a specialized radio receiver and reel-to-reel tape recorder. When the receiver picked up a particular tone, it would record the subsequent bulletin. The device cost about $600. The LAPD's chief, William H. Parker, was interested, though skeptical, warning the inventor, "We're going to name this damn thing Sigalert." More practically, he refused to use it unless the receivers were made available to all Los Angeles radio stations — it could not be a KMPC monopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sig_Alert#The_origin_of_the_Sigmon_traffic_alerts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sig_Alert#The_origin_of_the_Si...
- pjlegato 11y agoBad traffic was mostly limited to a few large cities such as LA then. In most of the US, it was not nearly as bad. It was also believed that traffic was a fairly minor infrastructure problem that could easily be resolved by widening the highways, adding a few more lanes here and there. (Turns out that when you add lanes, it just causes that many more people to drive on that road, but this was not yet widely apparent at the time.)