Public transit is now the cause of the reforming classes,
and the car their villain. The car is the consumer economy
on wheels: atomizing, competitive, inhuman—and implicitly
racist, hiving people off to segregated communities—while
the subway and the train are communal zendos. Good people
ride bicycles and buses; bad people ride in ever-bigger cars.
Another surprise:
People always maintain, similarly, that the big auto
manufacturers killed L.A.’s once efficient public-transit
system, leaving the city at the mercy of polluting and
gridlocked cars. That this is, at best, a very partial
truth does not weaken its claim on our consciousness.
Yeah, you don't need a conspiracy to end up where we are. You just need cars to be very-beneficial to owners when most things aren't built up with car infrastructure and most people don't own cars (and they are! That's true!); and for us to start catering to that in our infrastructure-planning since, you know, it's better; and for there to be a hard-to-see-in-the-moment tipping point where suddenly everyone needs a car because everything's built with cars in mind and everything's very far apart now, but also everyone's worse-off, in precisely the ways that cars were suppose to improve things (time savings, especially), plus some others, than if we'd never had widespread private car ownership in the first place (which, there was such a tipping point, and we blew past it many decades ago). Self-interest takes care of the rest.