[tic_tac]

I don't think people who drive cars are "pro-car" in the sense your thinking of. They simply use cars because it's convenient for them, and in general public transport doesn't make much sense in their communities so they ignore it.

In big cities on the other hand many people don't have cars and you find people who both use public transportation and passionately advocate for it. They are "pro-public transit" in a political sense and have a deep seated dislike for cars for various reasons whereas the car people really don't have an opinion about public transport.

[asdff]

I encourage you to read the story of the Purple Line in LA before you assume that these pro car people don't exist. They managed to stall the completion of this subway line for nearly 25 years (the ball is rolling now thankfully) under the false narrative that constructing this line would lead to beverly hills high school becoming a smoking crater in the ground, a high school that they currently allow fracking to happen on the campus, and have used it's school funding to mount failed lawsuits against LA metro.

"Pro car" people really do exist, and they are batshit crazy.

[TulliusCicero]

> They simply use cars because it's convenient for them, and in general public transport doesn't make much sense in their communities so they ignore it.

There's really two overlapping categories here. There are absolutely some people who proactively hate public transit, biking, walkability, etc. if it in any way takes away from cars.

Then there are people who are, as you say, not really ideological about it, they just use cars because that's the way to get around that works for them. But, once there's a proposal to, say, reduce street parking and add a protected bike lane, or a bus lane, or something like that, often these people are suddenly very pro-car and anti-multi-modal transportation indeed, because they feel that their current lifestyle is threatened.

I don't totally blame this sort of person for how they feel: all their life, all they've seen is that driving works and other things don't. Because in the cities in which they've lived, that's how things are, because that's how things have been designed to work. Public transit has been terrible where they've lived, so why would they want money to go to public transit improvements? But, they're still wrong, it's just an understandable sort of ignorance.

> They are "pro-public transit" in a political sense and have a deep seated dislike for cars for various reasons whereas the car people really don't have an opinion about public transport.

Well, there aren't very many who dislike cars outright in general. They don't like how much resources cars get in the middle of cities, because cars usually have gotten far too much land and money relative to their utility and externalities there.

If you look at countries like Germany or the Netherlands, plenty of people still drive, but they have a saner, more diverse set of viable transportation options. That's what "pro-transit" urbanists in the US usually want, rather than the driving monoculture that is so common in most US cities and towns.

Personally, I'd love to see car 'bans' in city core areas like what's being worked on in Oslo or Barcelona (or was it Madrid?). Or the city quadrant division in Groningen, that's clever. Does that mean I hate cars? Nah, I actually love road trips, there are some things that cars are super great for. But cars don't belong for most trips in city centers, they make things worse, and even the people who currently do have to drive downtown aren't exactly loving it, right?

US city centers really have the worst of both worlds. They're still designed for driving in a way that makes walking, biking, and public transit some combination of inefficient, unsafe, and unpleasant. But driving there isn't fun either; the very nature of being dense means that parking and traffic are both major pains. So no matter what you choose, it still sucks. In contrast, taking transit into the center of Munich and walking around is actually pretty nice! And this is true for many non-US cities around the world.