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)

>>cagey+cA
> (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)

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.

>>yamtad+Ss1
You don't need a conspiracy, but here is one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

The default assumption should be that people who benefit from auto sales are actively trying to block public transportation. It's foolish to think otherwise.

>>skulk+iz1
"Quinby and Snell held that the destruction of streetcar systems was integral to a larger strategy to push the United States into automobile dependency. Most transit scholars disagree, suggesting that transit system changes were brought about by other factors; economic, social, and political factors such as unrealistic capitalization, fixed fares during inflation, changes in paving and automotive technology, the Great Depression, antitrust action, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, labor unrest, market forces including declining industries' difficulty in attracting capital, rapidly increasing traffic congestion, the Good Roads Movement, urban sprawl, tax policies favoring private vehicle ownership, taxation of fixed infrastructure, franchise repair costs for co-located property, wide diffusion of driving skills, automatic transmission buses, and general enthusiasm for the automobile.[b]

The accuracy of significant elements of Snell's 1974 testimony was challenged in an article published in Transportation Quarterly in 1997 by Cliff Slater.[48]

Recent journalistic revisitings question the idea that GM had a significant impact on the decline of streetcars, suggesting rather that they were setting themselves up to take advantage of the decline as it occurred. Guy Span suggested that Snell and others fell into simplistic conspiracy theory thinking, bordering on paranoid delusions[61] stating,

    Clearly, GM waged a war on electric traction. It was indeed an all out assault, but by no means the single reason for the failure of rapid transit. Also, it is just as clear that actions and inactions by government contributed significantly to the elimination of electric traction."[62]"

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