“It turns out not burning a bunch of fossil fuels leads to less pollution”… news at 11.
The really dumb part of all of this is that people have just accepted cars as the default mode of transportation for so long that it’s hard to even envision a world without them. They’re normal, despite being expensive, dangerous, horribly inefficient, killing people actively (crashes) and passively (air pollution, plastic in our lungs, parkinsons/dementia, obesity, and more), and directly contributing to isolation in our communities. Every car we can get off the road, especially in our cities, makes the world a better place.
people have just accepted cars as the default mode of transportation
That wasn’t an accident and it didn’t just ‘happen;’ it was the very deliberate result of a combination of automobile and oil industry propaganda and US government policy back in the 1930s-1950s, motivated by several factors ranging from utopian modernist city planning to good ol’fashioned racism.
there’s also the argument that pushing to distribute population centers away from cities forced the soviet union to manufacture larger and more numerous atomic weapons to maintain parity with US capabilities.
not in the “hey we want to save as many people” way it’s portrayed, more like, let’s make it harder for the sov’s to equal the potential megadeaths we intended to dish out
exclusively bulldozes entire black neighborhoods while at the same creating redline laws that prohibit black people from owning houses in the suburbs. peak racism policy
Its an interesting angle because that is what we did exactly with smartphones and social media too. We adopted them so voluntarily as if they were the best things happened in this century.
But looks like in todays world we could have been a much better society without them ever existing
For all the doomscrolling we do on smartphones, I’m still of the mindset that there are many ways their existence has made people’s lives better. For instance, I likely never would have become so transit-brained if not for smartphones. I practically have nightmares of trying to navigate train maps/schedules through nothing but paper and a loose idea of where my destination was.
Ahah never heard transit-brained before. That always fascinated me. I could never relate to my friends having a hard time with directions. I could always look at a map and compass and find my way.
I remember reading somewhere that due to increased reliance to automated navigation systems, people are losing physical navigation skills.
I think for me, it’s just difficulty with training steps, the same way many students struggle with the common ways of teaching math, but are great at it once practiced.
I used to religiously follow directions around my area. Now, I bring my smartphone for safety, but I often find myself navigating without it.
I’d still struggle with paper alone, since there would be so many turns I’d want to verify - and quite often, street signs are obscured in some way.
The crazy thing as well is that especially after COVID people will use the isolation of cars as a positive. You have people who don’t like transit cause they would have to be near other people. Which just shows how crazy isolated and disconnected from our communities we are in the US atleast.
“It turns out not burning a bunch of fossil fuels leads to less pollution”… news at 11.
The really dumb part of all of this is that people have just accepted cars as the default mode of transportation for so long that it’s hard to even envision a world without them. They’re normal, despite being expensive, dangerous, horribly inefficient, killing people actively (crashes) and passively (air pollution, plastic in our lungs, parkinsons/dementia, obesity, and more), and directly contributing to isolation in our communities. Every car we can get off the road, especially in our cities, makes the world a better place.
That wasn’t an accident and it didn’t just ‘happen;’ it was the very deliberate result of a combination of automobile and oil industry propaganda and US government policy back in the 1930s-1950s, motivated by several factors ranging from utopian modernist city planning to good ol’fashioned racism.
Some random sources to get folks started:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement
https://www.strongtowns.org/curbside-chat-1/2015/12/14/americas-suburban-experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_(New_York_World's_Fair)
https://www.pbssocal.org/history-society/the-birth-of-sprawl-how-ending-the-great-depression-meant-inventing-the-suburbs
there’s also the argument that pushing to distribute population centers away from cities forced the soviet union to manufacture larger and more numerous atomic weapons to maintain parity with US capabilities.
not in the “hey we want to save as many people” way it’s portrayed, more like, let’s make it harder for the sov’s to equal the potential megadeaths we intended to dish out
…And we’re totally not moving to suburbs because we’re racist.
exclusively bulldozes entire black neighborhoods while at the same creating redline laws that prohibit black people from owning houses in the suburbs. peak racism policy
We needed that freeway there too make our commutes from the
racistsuburbs shorter.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motonormativity
I’ll definitely have to check out the underpinnings and use of that term. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
Hey hey hey, don’t you know the real solution to vehicle deaths is to get a bigger car?
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2023/mar/19/suvs-are-more-popular-than-ever-in-australia-but-there-is-a-downside
Its an interesting angle because that is what we did exactly with smartphones and social media too. We adopted them so voluntarily as if they were the best things happened in this century.
But looks like in todays world we could have been a much better society without them ever existing
For all the doomscrolling we do on smartphones, I’m still of the mindset that there are many ways their existence has made people’s lives better. For instance, I likely never would have become so transit-brained if not for smartphones. I practically have nightmares of trying to navigate train maps/schedules through nothing but paper and a loose idea of where my destination was.
Ahah never heard transit-brained before. That always fascinated me. I could never relate to my friends having a hard time with directions. I could always look at a map and compass and find my way.
I remember reading somewhere that due to increased reliance to automated navigation systems, people are losing physical navigation skills.
I think for me, it’s just difficulty with training steps, the same way many students struggle with the common ways of teaching math, but are great at it once practiced.
I used to religiously follow directions around my area. Now, I bring my smartphone for safety, but I often find myself navigating without it.
I’d still struggle with paper alone, since there would be so many turns I’d want to verify - and quite often, street signs are obscured in some way.
The crazy thing as well is that especially after COVID people will use the isolation of cars as a positive. You have people who don’t like transit cause they would have to be near other people. Which just shows how crazy isolated and disconnected from our communities we are in the US atleast.