[thusky]

I don't think the idea that the general, informed will of Americans somehow chose cars over public transportation holds water. What was the mechanism of that choice on an individual level, free of influence from car companies, between a future with car infrastructure with all the impacts understood (including the land space costs preventing density and efficiency) and other solutions?

It is demonstrably the correct answer, regardless what the largely un- or just as often mis-informed think, not that they were really "asked" in the first place.

[pdonis]

> the general, informed will of Americans somehow chose cars over public transportation

This is a fantasy in any society, not just America. No piece of social infrastructure on the scale of "cars vs. public transportation" in any country gets decided by "the general, informed will" of all the people.

The "mechanism of choice on an individual level" in a free country is simple, and I've already described it: people look at the alternatives reasonably available to them and choose the one that suits them best. And the aggregation of all those individual choices shapes the infrastructure, which in turn of course affects what alternatives are reasonably available to the next generation. That's how free markets and free societies work. But of course such a process does not involve any "general, informed will" of the people as a whole. It just involves a huge number of individuals interacting.

The other possibility, in a country that's not a free country (such as one large East Asian country one city of which has been mentioned, not by me, in this overall discussion), is for some small group at the top to decide how they think things should be arranged, and then just impose that on everybody. In such a country there is no "mechanism of choice on an individual level" regarding large scale infrastructure at all; it is imposed by those in charge. People do of course still make individual choices in such countries, but their choices don't really affect the social infrastructure the way they can in a free country.

The US today is not fully a free country in the sense I described above, since there is quite a bit of top-down imposition of things (and not just by governments--there were of course a number of large corporations pushing car-centric infrastructure in the late 19th and 20th centuries), so it's really a mix of the two possibilities I gave. But neither possibility involves "the general, informed will of Americans" deciding anything.

[shiroiushi]

Sorry, but this is just wrong. The simple truth is that people's opinions are usually a product of their upbringing and experiences. People raised in a warmongering society tend to favor warmongering, and people raised in a peaceful society tend to favor peaceful societies, for instance. In the case of cars, Americans really do favor cars and the car-based society they live in, because it's what they know and are familiar with.

So, if you try polling a bunch of suburbanite Americans and ask them if they'd favor abolishing their suburbs and turning them into extremely dense and generally car-free (or at least "car-inconvenient", i.e. narrow, slow roads and very little parking) urban areas, of course the vast majority of them are going to say "no". You can see it right here on HN every time this kind of discussion comes up: regular Americans like things the way they are. If they didn't, they'd be voting for something radically different, but they aren't. Sure, there's a minority of anti-car-culture Americans and even some activists, but they're a minority.

As for your characterization of Japan as an authoritarian society, that really seems extremely ignorant and probably even racist. It's a democracy, in case you've never read Wikipedia, so just like any democratic society, if people get angry enough, they'll vote for someone different, which happens from time to time.

[pdonis]

> that really seems extremely ignorant

Given the characterization of Americans that you gave elsewhere upthread, and which I responded to, you are in no position to make any such accusation, even if I were in fact talking about Japan, which, as I have posted already, I wasn't.

[pdonis]

> people's opinions are usually a product of their upbringing and experiences

So this would include you, right? So what gives your opinions any more weight than anyone else's?

> Americans really do favor cars and the car-based society they live in, because it's what they know and are familiar with.

And you favor other arrangements because it's what you know and are familiar with. So what's your point?

> your characterization of Japan

Japan was not the society I was referring to. The one I was referring to begins with a "C", and the city within it begins with an "S".