[revscat]

I’m not entirely sure if I understand the point you’re making, but let me try an analogy.

We are all forced to buy a car. There is no one with a gun to our head forcing such a purchase, or a law specifically requiring you to buy a car. But nevertheless the laws are structured so that everyone realistically must buy a car, whether they want to or not.

If you chose not to buy a car then your life will be dramatically more expensive and difficult to live, because of the network effects of this requirement.

So while you are technically free to not buy a car, realistically you are forced to do so.

Is that approximately what you mean?

[SoftTalker]

> If you chose not to buy a car then your life will be dramatically more expensive and difficult to live, because of the network effects of this requirement.

That depends where you live. In Chicago, for example, your life will be simpler and less expensive if you don't own a car.

[dylan604]

I don't understand this as a blanket rule either. My life is dramatically less expensive because of not having a car. I don't have to fill it with gas. I don't have to carry insurance. I choose not to have a car, and while somethings are less convenient it does not prevent me from existing. I have an ebike and it suffices for everything thing that is a necessity for me. For the other things, rental for a weekend away is very much a thing.

Now, for people that choose to live in the further reaches of suburbia where things are not nearly as close, then cars become more of a need. But that is a decision when location to suburbia or further was made.

[bobthepanda]

Eh, eventually there is a network effect and much of everything needs a car.

If you happen to live in one of the numerous cities in the US that has a hollowed out core, you need a car even if you live downtown. And often the cities that have vibrant walkable downtowns are expensive to move to.

[SoftTalker]

Any city with a "downtown" is in 2024 going to have uber/lyft, probably bus services of some sort, and there's always cycling. Groceries and supplies can be delivered to your door. There is less need for a car today than there has been in a long time.

[revscat]

You’re still forced to participate in car culture if you use Lyft/Uber/Instacart, you’ve just added middlemen and increased the cost even further.

This comment comes across as incredibly privileged, to be honest. Most people must drive to work. Asking them to use Uber for such a purpose is just… it’s kind of infuriating.

[lovich]

Eh, I lived for 7 years without a car in suburbs. Granted the local market, and I specifically mean market vs supermarket, was a 5 minute walk from me, the supermarket was a 30 minute walk if I felt fancy that night, and Amazon delivered.

I will grant that I was within walking distance of the last stop on the local metros subway system so maybe some people wouldn’t consider that the suburbs, but it was considered so for the city.

Also just broke 20k miles last week on my vehicle I bought in 2021 after moving to the countryside so it’s not like ive

[bobthepanda]

this sounds like not the US. in the vast majority of the US traditional markets/small groceries are effectively extinct and illegal to build new in a financially sensible way.

[lovich]

I don’t have enough data to give you an answer one way or another but this was New England and we have a lot of things that are common for us but weird for the rest of the country by dint of being where colonization efforts were good enough to be started and built up, but not so bad that they are worth replacing.

Examples include individual shops that used to be called markets which are not farmers markets or supermarkets, basements in all/most homes, and town halls being an expectation of normal governance rather than a newsworthy event

[fifticon]

Ironically, outside the US I managed to live until the age of 41, before I caved in and got a driver's license. Instead, I got around by train, tram, bus, bicycle, feet and taxi. I would argue, that in a society not designed to require a car, you are not really forced to.

[rubyfan]

> But nevertheless the laws are structured so that everyone realistically must buy a car, whether they want to or not.

Do you mean lack of government subsidies supporting better public transportation? Or something else?

[pottspotts]

The car industry has been lobbying congress and locales for 50+ years. Laws like jaywalking were at the behest of car companies, and that alone makes walking legally very difficult in nearly any area with a downtown.

The lack of subsidies certainly don't help. Neither does the insatiable appetite for new cars.

[tiahura]

Do you know anyone who has ever been cited for jaywalking?

[treyd]

It's extremely possible to live in Boston (or some surrounding areas like Cambridge or Brookline) without a car. I did for 6 years.

[w-ll]

The emphasis should be on Boston not extremely, there are few cities in America you can live without a car or be considered an outcast without one

[dexterdog]

And that is an incredibly expensive place to live.

[xarope]

I still remember the Alewife and Braintree...

[soulofmischief]

It's more like, you think you are free, because from birth society and CorpGov condition you to operate within an accepted status quo, and incentives are structured in order to support that.

But the moment you question the status quo, or try to go against it, you find yourself targeted by corporate and social violence. You might lose your job, the respect of your peers, your family, house, car or more.

Here is an easy example:

A portion of your tax money is funding genocide and anti-democratic military coups in Israel and other countries.

If you decide (as any rational citizen should) to no longer pay income tax knowing that you lack any discretion over how it is spent, and you decide to demand a more transparent and restricted tax system, then the government will threaten you with economic hardship and even prison. They will surveil and discredit you if you receive any modicum of notoriety, just as they do to sociopolitical activists and protestors.

You won't be able to operate a business while opposing income tax laws, and thus conscious political action is relegated to the elite, who don't need to work, and the poor, who already don't significantly benefit from the system. The rest of the working class is forced to play ball, or lose everything.

That's not freedom, even if it looks like Freedom™ to a certain class of bootlickers who are conditioned to maintain the status quo, even if it means turning on their neighbor.

[whimsicalism]

laws are structured? or just the cumulative impact of societies decisions.

humans are social creatures, of course if everyone else has a car it is going to be inconvenient for you to not have one. this is not a solvable problem

[soulofmischief]

The problem is that corporate interests pushed for a car-centric society. You can't point to consumer choice as a justification for the current system, when we were given little choice to begin with.

It might seem like a moot point in San Francisco where there is free public transit, but in cities like mine, there is an intentional lack of alternatives, in order for cars to be leveraged as a self-reinforcing socioeconomic class boundary.

[miki123211]

> The problem is that corporate interests pushed for a car-centric society

I'd say it's more NIMBY interests than corporate interests.

The US, in contrast to Asia and Europe, builds sprawling suburbs, consisting only of single-family houses, with no multi-story apartment complexes and no other services/infrastructure in walking distance.

Most people would tell you that they don't want things to be this way, but will actually complain about proposals to make things better.

If you build apartment complexes, you can fit more people in a smaller area, which makes public transit a lot more economical. Add the fact that you don't need to go anywhere far at all for a lot of things, like grocery shopping for example, and that makes you need a car a lot less.

It's also worth considering that the US has been constantly rich for the last century or so, it has been far less affected by the second world war, dictatorships and communism than Europe and Asia, which made cars a lot less of a luxury, and hence made public transit a lot less of a necessity.

Leveraging cars as a self-reinforcing socioeconomic class boundary is a direct consequence of all of this, but also one more (self-reinforcing) reason why people need cars. You just can't do that sort of thing in Europe, if there are well-off people without cars, you can't assume that well-off people have cars, so well-off people will keep not having cars, and so it goes.

[tiahura]

Uh no. Most people do want large single-family homes. Maybe you’ve heard stories about the real estate market over the last 10 years?

[tourmalinetaco]

Maybe in your specific case, that is cities with poor public transit, but the US is massive and has always required some form of long distance travel. One can make arguments for corporate interests in expensive gas-guzzlers, completely eliminating the small and medium sized automobiles, or for corporate-backed government decisions in new city infrastructure being less accessible without a car, but we have a car-centric society here because they are physically required for the majority of Americans to get from A to B, and there is literally no way of fixing that.

[piva00]

> but we have a car-centric society here because they are physically required for the majority of Americans to get from A to B, and there is literally no way of fixing that.

The majority of Americans trying to get from A to B are driving less than 60 km/day, a distance which trains can cover pretty damn fast.

For longer travel you could have high speed trains on both coasts' corridors, very few people are traveling NYC -> LA on a regular basis, most people will travel on their surroundings (500-1000 km).

You could have a multimodal system covering the most important urban corridors, rural places would almost always need cars due to the low density but it's a big fat lie that the USA is car-centric because it's the only solution for its size.

The only reason you are a car-centric country in 2024 is because of incentives for the car industry, the design of your cities being stuck in car-centric mindset from the 1950s-1960s.

You don't need to give up cars completely, you just need infrastructure to not require a car for people traveling around your major urban centres. High speed rail corridors between Seattle - Portland - San Francisco - Los Angeles - Las Vegas - Phoenix, another corridor from Boston - NYC - Philadelphia - Baltimore - DC branching out to Pittsburgh - Cleveland - Detroit - Chicago. With those you cover a lot of the major economic centres.

China is also massive and they've managed it.

Except for some new shiny skyscraper, the USA feels more backwards each time I visit, like the country is stuck in the 1980s-1990s and refuses to be updated to how a modern country can be in 2024.

[mjx0]

> and there is literally no way of fixing that.

This is obviously incorrect from a quick glance at history.

Long distance travel in the US used to occur primarily by train. Short distance travel used to occur by walking and streetcar.

Now, with suburban sprawl (a relatively recent phenomen), we have something we could call medium distance that is filled in some areas by light rail.

We now also have other options for very long distance travel: aircraft.

[tourmalinetaco]

What I said is obviously correct, especially historically, and you pointed out exactly why: medium travel, which is far more prevalent than simply modern suburbia. Have you even been outside a city? Take a quick glance at history and you will see just how crucial private transport for medium-long distance is in America. Horses and buggies have been a mainstay before the car. Rail is simply too inflexible to support medium travel in sparsely populated areas. And medium travel is what I would classify most rural Americans are from their nearest grocer. Long distance via train, that makes sense. A centralized rail system, such as subway, in a city also makes sense to cover medium distances. However, we already have the infrastructure to handle medium distances without new expensive rails, that being highways. The cost to fit rails across the entire US would be enormous, and that’s ignoring the long term costs such as staffing and maintenance.

In my small town, we have roughly 125 people. We are, roughly, 35 minutes away from the nearest grocery store, or about 40 miles. Too long to walk or bike in a reasonable time. You could use a motorized bike but the amount of food for a family would be unwieldy. The only viable solution is to drive via car, because you need the trunk space. And both options to get there require roads. Now, let’s suppose we magically replaced highways for rails. What happens is simple: either the government is bleeding immense amounts of money orchestrating train rides to places where no one is regularly using it, or certain less populated areas are underserved.