How to quit cars

>>amathe+(OP)
Given the article's title, I didn't expect to find the following within:

    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.

It seems like a pretty even-handed summation of the situation: the "reforming classes" need a target, thus "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.

(The surprising part to me is that this is claimed to be a "very partial truth". In the multitudes of HN discussions of "cars evil" articles, this claim is almost always trotted out, and almost never challenged)

zlacker