[baal80spam]

> Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society.

You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.

[armonster]

Their negative effects are much more vast, subtle, and cultural. You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people. It has created an expensive barrier of entry for existing in society and added a ton of friction to doing anything and everything, especially with people. That's not even getting into the climate effects.

The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.

[23j423j423hj]

The best way I've ever heard it described is that in a car-dominant society, every new neighbor in your neighborhood is somebody in your way, taking up your spot, making you late in your commute.

The psychological effects of this are enormous and under discussed.

[xienze]

And in a public transport-dominant society every neighbor is also someone in your way, taking up a spot at the restaurant you walk to, filling up the subway train and therefore making you late in your commute…

There’s no free lunch. Doesn’t matter where you are, more people = more crowds.

[23j423j423hj]

In a much less visceral way. You can always let one more person on the subway.

Being stuck in traffic is a daily physical reminder of the zero-sum nature of car-dominated societies.

[BirAdam]

Humans are pack animals, not flock or herd. I think going beyond the Dunbar number is possibly the thing making people grumpy in highly dense areas. If people cannot know those around them in a meaningful way, do they even view them as human?

[xienze]

What kind of meaningful connections can you make when you live in a city with a a large transient population and are surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people on a daily basis, come on now. People can only have so many friends and acquaintances. Just because my neighbors live across the street doesn’t mean it’s impossible for me to talk to them. I have about a half a dozen people in the neighborhood I know well and have work acquaintances and long term friends. Which is plenty. This whole suburbia is isolating thing is being a bit dramatized here, sheesh.

[Waterluvian]

I think a lot of it depends on personal opinions on what society should be like being treated like objective truths.

[anon84873628]

Yes exactly. Let's simplify it to the individualist vs collectivist spectrum.

Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).

In the car centric places, a few generations later they become an indelible aspect of nature. It is impossible for most people to imagine society working otherwise. And even when they do, the collective action problems are near insurmountable. The introduction of technology has irreversibly trapped us in a way of thinking we can't escape.

This is exactly the premise of the Amish religion. You must strictly control technology to create the society you want, not the other way around.

[adolph]

> Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).

Something I recently learned about roads from Stewart Brand's new book "Maintenance" is that the first groups pushing for paved roads were cyclists:

  The Good Roads Movement of the late 19th century began as a grass-roots 
  crusade to improve roads for bicyclists. By the 20th century, it had turned 
  into a national effort embraced by the automobile industry, railroad tycoons 
  and presidents.

https://www.governing.com/context/how-gilded-age-bicyclists-...

[121789]

it is kind of hilarious to hear people just keep making the same arguments as ted kaczynski

[only-one1701]

You mean the brilliant mathematician with the correct insights into the modern American condition?

[ButlerianJihad]

Neither Ted Kaczynski nor Senator McCarthy were wrong, even if we can criticize their ways and means.

[zshrdlu]

Ted Kaczynski specifically was advocating for primitivity, no?

[KPGv2]

what was Senator McCarthy right about?

[eschaton]

Crazy that someone would use this pseudonym while at the same time saying that all society's problems are caused by socialist and Communist conspiracy.

[CamperBob2]

The thing is, the Amish don't try to tell the rest of the world that their way is the "obviously correct" way and that everybody else is doing it wrong, the way anti-personal mobility advocates do.

[jimbokun]

Robustly advocating for your opinions is not an act of oppression.

The advocates of the automobile have been far, far more successful at shaping US society, laws, culture and our physical environment.

I imagine that’s also true in many other nations to a lesser extent.

[CamperBob2]

And at some point, maybe it makes sense to ask why, instead of blindly accepting and propagating the hive-mind party line exhibited in threads such as this one.

[skrtskrt]

“Anti-personal mobility” is beyond absurd, absolute loony-bin stuff.

“Anti-personal mobility advocates” do not exist. Transit advocates exist, and improvements in transit also massively benefit those who need to or prefer to drive.

[ButlerianJihad]

Most motorists absolutely hate e-scooters and e-bikes. They hate them with a white-hot passion. You will never see more road rage than against a scooter when I ride it in a traffic lane. The scooter goes about 17mph, and with 3+ traffic lanes available to cars, they will pile up behind a scooter, scream out their open windows, honk and cut me off, and spit in my face: yes literally spit all over my face, because they hate personal mobility so much.

Motorists hate anything that isn't a car and is in their way. Motorists hate Critical Mass; they hate light rail or streetcars that hog their rights-of-way; they hate pedestrians (especially when pedestrians aren't wearing the right clothes); they hate Lyft, Uber, and Waymo especially; they hate big trucks and they hate Amish people with horse-drawn buggies.

Motorists will establish coalitions to vote against public transit measures in their home towns. They have come out in City Council and other public meetings, to protest and rail, so to speak, to rail against the expansion of light rail into their neighborhoods, because not only do they hate the construction, but they hate the "type of people" that light rail brings, and ultimately they hate the gentrification that comes from a fixed-route project that will ultimately close their shitty exploitive businesses and replace them with more elevated exploitation and richer moguls.

[tikhonj]

It's the folks pushing cars that are both the most strident and the most successful at pushing their "obviously correct" way onto everyone, at least in the US.

[Negitivefrags]

Cars are not popular becuase people pushed them. Cars are popular because the utility is undeniable.

This is true for any kind of transformative technology. Marketing and lobbying can only get you so far. If something has enough utility, it will be used regardless of what people say they want.

[anon84873628]

I don't think a armonster was quite claiming it to be "obviously correct". But rather taking it for granted that this a valid hypothesis:

- We would have gotten most of the social utility of automobiles, without most of the social negatives, if personal vehicles had mostly never happened.

And implied from that, we should stop having them now.

Given the known ills of society, I think those negatives are pretty uncontroversial. To the point that personal car proponents have some burden to explain why we should keep it up.

[the13]

THIS. But the car/oil companies did do bad things like work to undermine public transport & EVs back in day. Now we have sprawling burbs & social isolation. Phones, death of 3rd spaces & church going, etc. made it worse as people stopped having bigger families, leading to even more isolation.

[Barrin92]

>personal opinions on what society should be like

Anyone who still even has a personal opinion at all pertaining to what the world should look like distinct from swallowing whatever 'the market' has decided to impose on them is worth listening to.

That's the most interesting thing about the situation of technology today. Most technology is banal, what's notable is that apparently now a culture needs to be in possession of 'objective truth' (no such thing exists) to defend what is, by definition, a subjective way of life.

[sambellll]

I don't think it's fair to say suburbanization lead to isolation. I think factors like social media have had a much bigger impact.

It's not like you're living away from any people - you have 100 other neighbours living on your street!

[jakeydus]

Proximity doesn’t automatically result in interaction, though. If every one of those 100 people get in their private mobile room every time they leave their private mobile room there is no chance for any of them to interact.

[b112]

100+ years ago, certainly more people lived in rural areas. In Canada and the US, pre 1900s, it was something like 70% of the population was rural.

Cars came in parallel with a lot of change.

[nradov]

The upsides of automobiles, or personal mobility in general, are enormous. I can go wherever I want, whenever I want along with other people and cargo. I don't have to wait for a schedule set by someone else, or worry about union strikes. I love my cars!

[MrJohz]

This is true, although I have to say as someone who doesn't own a car, good public transport can avoid most of those issues. I live in a small-ish city (500K - 1M pop, depending on how you count it), and I can get pretty much anywhere I need to without worrying about schedules and certainly without worrying about strikes. The biggest issue is getting out of the city - that's when it's usually more important to worry about schedules, but it's still mostly doable - and occasionally transporting furniture or something like that.

On the other hand, the benefits I get from that public transport are incredible - it's cheap, it's always there, it requires minimal logistics in groups (no trying to figure out who goes in what car and needs to be dropped off where at what time), it works regardless of my level of inebriation (admittedly I've not pushed that one to any sort of extreme yet), it's safe enough for children to travel independently (no dropping them off and picking them up), and it's largely accessible for people with difficulties walking or moving about.

I think a big part of the issue is that people have tried out poor public transport infrastructure and recognised - often correctly - that their car is way better for them. But good public infrastructure can often be far more convenient than cars, it just requires people to be motivated enough to build and finance it. A neighbour of mine didn't notice his car had been towed for a week because he used public transport so much and so rarely touched his car. When he'd parked his car it was fine, but then they needed to block of the street to do some work somewhere, and he didn't notice they'd confiscated all the cars there. That's the sort of effect that good public transport can have - so comfortable that you can forget you even have a car.

[cgannett]

You can go wherever you want whenever you want... until everyone does this and now you are stalled in traffic with no end in sight.

[kraquepype]

Those are all enormous benefits to you and you alone. The greatest thing about cars are the things they do for you.

In order for someone else to have those benefits, they also need a car.

If as a society, if we could feel the same way about public transit, bike lanes, sidewalks, that you do about your own personal vehicle - we'd be better off.

[archagon]

It's the toxic American hyper-individualist mindset. As an American, I hate it so much.

[BirAdam]

Hyper-individualism goes a long way in eroding racism and sexism though, urging people to view others as individuals rather than members of some larger group. I’d rather hyper-individualism than hyper-collectivism. Once you consider someone first as a member of some other group, the marginalization and then erasure of that other becomes easier.

[jimbokun]

There are countless use cases for point to point personal transportation not covered by public transit options.

[poncho_romero]

Most of these use cases exist because of the prevelance of personal vehicles. We reach for cars because they are there. We see the world through windshields, so when problems arise we conceive of car-based solutions. Cars force us into city designs and styles of living that require cars. That is to say, cars necessitate cars.

[munificent]

Everyone hates cars until they need an ambulance.

Yes, obviously there are many negative externalities to a car-driven culture, but just like we can easily become blind to the diffuse societal costs of a piece of technology, I think a culture of nay-saying makes it very easy to be blind to the diffuse value of a piece of technology too.

Loud stinky cities full of pollution and climate change are obviously horrible.

But we easily take for granted how amazing it is to be able to drive to a mountain and go for a hike, or call an ambulance, or go to a restaurant when it's raining out, or safely travel in a city without risking being assaulted, etc.

Internal combustion engines are amazing and horrible.

[Lord_Baltimore]

Most people that are against car-centric cities like myself are not against cars 100% but against their level of priority in the design of our cities and societies.

Many of the scenarios you mentoned aren't even that big of a deal for many. I have walked in the rain many times and somehow I was still ok. You could argue that car culture has made us soft in some ways.

Nevertheless, if we reduced our emphasis on cars in society and the design of our cities to the point where cars were mainly used for those specific cases where cars truly are by far the best options (like ambulances) we would have more livable and walkable cities and ironically cities where it is nicer for those who really really want/need to drive since everyone and their mom wouldn't be driving because they aren't forced to drive to everything. Fewer people clogging the roads like my co-worker who would watch Netflix while she drove to work. Obviously she didn't have a passion for driving but was forced to because she lived in a sprawling metro with terrible transit options.

[munificent]

I agree a middle position where cities are dense and people-focused but where cars are still available would be ideal. That's pretty close to what I have here in Seattle and it's nice. I have a car and can park it by my house, but I don't use it for commuting to work.

(Well, I do right now because I'm recovering from surgery and can't walk to the bus stop. But I don't usually drive to work. Which is kind of my overall point. It's very easy for able-bodied younger people to think cars aren't necessary, but not everyone is so mobile.)

[duskdozer]

I like being able to use a car. I don't like being effectively dependent on using a car to go anywhere.

[1234letshaveatw]

This is a willfully ignorant and wildly incorrect take. Your isolation argument completely neglects socialization with family and friends that is supported via automotive mobility. Do you also somehow have the impression that automobiles somehow forced suburbanization? I think not- you don't want others to have the freedom to choose anything other than some industrialized urban existence. The effects of the automobile are vast, subtle, and cultural- and overwhelmingly positive

[jimbokun]

I would be very surprised if you could show a study demonstrating increased use of automobiles improves socialization with family and friends.

[1234letshaveatw]

Me going to the movies, sample size of one (big brain journal, 2026)

[BobbyJo]

Urbanization has separated far more families than suburbanization, so the isolation argument, as if suburbanization is the core cause, doesn't make sense to me.

[sambishop]

automobiles -> suburbanization -> isolation -> mental health crisis seems like a fairly easy hypothesis to test since there are still millions of people in america living densely and carless in places like nyc and you could demonstrate that they have a statistically significant gap in mental illnesses. so easy to test that i bet several people already have and you could just check.

[lazyasciiart]

Yes, they have. And they found it to be correct.

> living in dense inner-city areas did not carry the highest depression risks. Rather, after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, the highest risk was among sprawling suburbs

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10208571/

[couchand]

I can tell you as a resident of New York City that the negative effect of the automobile on the built environment is very much present here as well.

[sambishop]

for sure! but that's irrelevant to a causal chain that includes "suburbanization", since you're not in the suburbs (in manhattan at least, the walkability does drop off pretty quickly)

another interesting tack: how long did we have cars before we started talking about a widespread mental health crisis? is there a more parimonious explanation, like a different event that is located closer to it in time? perhaps smartphones or the internet?

[poncho_romero]

I think you are too focused on one problem caused by cars. Even if they didn't cause mental health problems due to isolation (seen most prominently in suburbia), they cause enough other problems to warrant pushback.

[sambishop]

arguments are not soldiers. i am specifically responding to the claim that cars leads to suburbs leads to mental health issues. i am not a partisan in the greater car wars.

[ButlerianJihad]

It is not merely suburbanization that has been caused by cars, but also the very urban fragmentation. Immigrants are no longer permitted to live in enclaves, ghettos, or the same neighborhood with one another.

Another thing about "this mental health crisis" is that it has been ongoing for many decades before we noticed it and before it was brought to the forefront. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was out and then President Reagan approved the mass closure of asylums. What happened was that massive numbers of citizens had been condemned and committed by their relatives and "put away" in homes, facilities, and institutions, and then Reagan shut 'em all down.

Today, the mentally ill live among us. Either their families care for them, or they live in jails/prisons because they became criminals and were convicted, or they live independently/on the streets. The mentally ill live now in "virtual institutions" where their chains and restraints consist of drugs. The drugs are what keep them connected to their home clinics and their psychiatrists. The drugs keep them coming back for more, month after month, to their pharmacies and clinics. The drugs they are convinced they cannot live without, making them compliant and unsure of what is really going on in their lives.

The non-criminal mentally ill are mostly encouraged to integrate and socialize, to seek employment and try to simulate functional human beings in society. So they live among us and they are causing more noticeable issues when they interact with people possessed of more sanity. The mentally ill are probably less likely to drive or own a vehicle, and more likely to rely on public transit, so you know where to find them.

But the mentally ill who live independently, and live with these "virtual restraints" are likewise living in fragmented neighborhoods that are not walkable and require a lot of effort to overcome the sheer distances that separate them from services and their employers. They're living among immigrants, foreigners, heathens and infidels, and on every corner is a moral trap such as easy alcohol, easy sex, easy gluttony, easy gambling that can ensnare even the sanest city dweller. These traps are, of course, legitimate businesses that cannot be shut down by a mere vice-squad raid.

So "this mental health crisis" in 2026 can perhaps be partly traced to the advent of personal motor vehicles, but I feel there are several causes that have brought it to the forefront.

[asdff]

You miss how this mental health crisis seemed to emerge in lock step with screentime. Not really suburbs. It is funny when people wax poetic now about the carefree latchkey adventurous childhoods of the boomers or gen x. I mean all of that stuff was little adventures happening in the suburbs. Nothing else to do inside so this is what would happen. You give that kid along with the rest of the kids in the neighborhood, well, tiktok there's your isolation and mental health crisis source right there. At least in the early dialup days kids were kicked off periodically so parents could use the landline, and there just wasn't such a bottomless well of content either to spend all waking time consuming.

EDIT: missed your other reply a few mins earlier alluding to smartphones already

[bccdee]

That's a common narrative in popular culture (especially since the publication of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation), but it doesn't really bear out in data. Smartphones don't really have a discernible impact on mental health at a population level.

The idea is that teen mental health got dramatically worse in the early 2010s at the same time as social media began to become ubiquitous, but this is likely a coincidence. The underlying metrics we're tracking here are self-harm hospitalizations, and concerns about teen self-harm were already growing in the early 2000s. This leads to a bunch of new guidance getting published which increases teen mental health screening, tracks mental health status as a cause of injuries, and forces insurance companies to cover associated costs.

It's one of those situations where our stats about a problem increased as we became better at tracking it. Teen suicidality is actually WAY down over the past ~30 years.

Qualitative data is, of course, much harder to work with than hospitalization numbers, but the data we do have suggests a weak correlation, if any, between phone use and poor mental health— see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30944443/, which suggests phones can explain at most 0.4% of variance in well-being among teens. [1]

It feels like common sense that social media is bad for you, and sure, there's plenty of work to be done in understanding how and why social media can cause harm. But the idea that there's some big crisis just doesn't pan out.

Info drawn from https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-anxious-generation...

[1]: In fairness, Haidt published a response to this article featuring a new, bespoke set of controls for the data. His analysis suggests that the impact of social media use on mental health is nearly twice as large as that of being sexually assaulted and four times larger than hard drug use (which itself has a slightly larger effect size than wearing glasses). Personally, I don't find these conclusions plausible at all. Maybe Haidt's been p-hacking, or maybe the data set is worthless. I couldn't say. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000169182...

[littlexsparkee]

you have to deal with selection bias - those are presumably very different groups of people selecting into the type of environment they favor at some level, albeit aconstrained by affordability

[coderenegade]

Except rural communities are both more car dependent than cities, and have more tightly knit communities, so isolation probably isn't just a function of owning cars. Cars are probably the wrong mode of transportation for large cities, but then the question becomes: is that how we should all live, and to what extent does a better solution for the group override a better solution for the individual? Because, like it or not, cars are a better personal solution if you aren't bumper-to-bumper in a commute. I'm not going to take my dog or my surfboard on the bus or a train, and I have a life that doesn't end at the city's boundaries.

[xnx]

Love the car. Hate the drivers. Soon we'll be able to get 100% of the benefit of cars (anytime anywhere private transportation), with almost none of the drawbacks (time waste, safety, cost, pollution, traffic, parking).

[prescriptivist]

> You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people.

Yes, you could say that, though I'm not sure who would actually say that seriously.

[nehal3m]

Respectfully, without judgement, your perspective may be wildly skewed because you’re American (going by your post history). I suspect the negative externalities in a society built around cars don’t register with you because to you it is the normal state of the world. As a Dutchman, I grew up in a built world that is based around the human scale and to me your parent’s claim comes across as astonishingly obvious.

[prescriptivist]

I didn't really say what my perspective is on whether the suburbs are good or bad or cars are good or bad. I think there are plenty of reasonable arguments as to whether they are or not. What I am dubious about is that they are somehow the source of some hand-wavy "widespread" mental health issue in America.

[nehal3m]

I wouldn't be surprised if it contributed significantly because of the lack of (access to) third places [0] it breeds, but that is conjecture on my part, so fair enough.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

[asdff]

I would be hesitant to draw that correlation. IMO cars give you more access to third places, not less. With a car one can cover far more ground in a given 30 min drive after rush hour died down probably in every city in the world, than what one can cover in 30 mins walk and transit ride (especially when transit schedules might favor a commute into the central part of town vs some off peak trip to a random corner of town).

Say what you will about the ills of the car, but it takes a lot of specific context for them to emerge as the worst option of transport from an individual perspective. Really most of the cars ills are from their collective harms, something most can't appreciate as a tragedy of the commons sort of failing.

[prescriptivist]

There's no shortage of third places in the American suburbs, you just have to drive to them. I'm sympathetic to the argument that walkable third places are better third places because I lived car-free in New York City for a decade and enjoyed many of them. But living in the suburbs or exurbs doesn't inherently mean you don't have access to shared communal spaces.

If I believed there is a crisis of isolation in the United States and degradation of community, I would first focus on more recent technologies, say ones introduced around 2007, than on technologies introduced in the early 1900s.

[coderenegade]

If anything, the golden age of third places coincided with the golden age of suburbanization, which was obviously heavily car dependent. Their death almost certainly has more to do with financialization making it harder for small businesses to stay afloat, a drop in demand due to competition for attention, and decreasing work-life balance eroding people's ability to socialize.

In my grandfather's day, one income was enough to support a household, and there was less free work being done on the job, which meant fewer hours and being less drained at the end of the day. And yes, people spent less time commuting, meaning they had more time and energy for socializing after work. But communities were also more decentralized, and population centers had fewer people in general. A big part of the problem is that modern cities can be massive, and invariably funnel people to a handful of work districts, which just doesn't scale. When you double the distance to the CBD, you quadruple the number of people coming in (give or take, it's not exact because we tend to increase density close to the CBD as a response to this). Take it from someone who's lived in a place where cars aren't really necessary, the logistics of urbanization are still a crap experience when you're crammed into a train carriage during rush hour. It's common for people to commute for 90 minutes on public transport in Asian megacities, for example.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The Netherlands has 513 cars per 1000 people compared to the US rate of 779. A significant difference, certainly, and it's plausible that there's a threshold effect where a society built around 50% more cars faces unique problems. But this doesn't at all seem consistent with the original idea that automobile technology itself is bad.

[sobjornstad]

Car ownership is not a good proxy for how important cars are to living well in a particular place, when the places you're comparing have completely different design philosophies. If you look at how many trips the average Dutch car owner takes by car vs. how many trips the average American car owner takes by car, I guarantee you there will be a much larger difference.

I'm also not sure that anyone was claiming automobile technology itself was bad, just that in many places at many times it has been used in suboptimal and harmful ways.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I definitely agree that merely having automobiles doesn't require adopting characteristically American urban design philosophy, and that this philosophy isn't very compatible with dense walkable urbanism. But I don't see how to interpret

> The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.

other than as a claim we should not have personal automobiles.

[nehal3m]

You might think so, but a flat number comparison doesn't do justice to the vast differences in urban planning. Check out this video, it describes Dutch urban planning pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k

[Aerroon]

I suppose in the Netherlands they use carts and horses to stock up the supermarket? To transport coal to the powerplant (or the wind turbine blades to where the wind turbine will be built)? Surely a bicycle isn't enough for that.

You might be only talking about personal cars, but you've got to remember that trucks share the same infrastructure cars use. Modern city wealth wouldn't be possible without engined vehicles driving on roads (maybe if you went really crazy with rail that could be exception). You take away personal cars and either the infrastructure stays or your city wouldn't be possible anymore either.

But even beyond that - personal cars provide a level of freedom and capability to the general population that no other technology can match. Trains suck, buses suck, passenger ships suck, planes are uncomfortable (but otherwise pretty good). Bikes don't work with long distances, multiple people, the infirm, winter (riding in the winter is a great way to get injured, two-wheeled vehicles don't do well with ice), bad weather, if you need to be presentable when you arrive. Oh, and bikes get stolen. Constantly.

[cryptopian]

There's a lot of people in this comment thread interpreting the post's analogy as "ban all cars forever" rather than "consider how to use them as part of a wider societal strategy that makes places better for everyone".

You can implement all kinds of transport badly. Trains can suck if they don't take you where you want to go, bicycles suck if wherever you live doesn't provide acceptable parking methods.

Cars are great in a vacuum, but once a city decides it's going all in on cars and bulldozes the place, they provide problems for anyone else. Buses will suck because they're stuck in traffic and walking will suck when you're getting around on the side of 3 lane highways or vast surface parking lots. Most importantly, driving will suck, because everyone has to drive everywhere, and that creates more traffic for the rest of us. You get in a doom loop where you build more lanes, which drives more vehicle traffic. If you make the alternatives more viable, people take up those alternatives and vehicle traffic eases.

[recursive]

It seems like a hard argument to make that bikes can suck more than cars because of parking. As a bicycle enthusiast, I can provide you with some better reasons. You'll get rained on. You'll get sweaty. The helmet will mess up your fancy hair. You can't go as fast.

Parking is one of the biggest upsides of bikes IMO.

[dpark]

> Buses will suck

Buses are only workable because of cars. We build roads for cars first and trucks second. Buses are at most 3rd in the list and getting to use them is an incidental side benefit.

No one builds enough roads for buses. They have to use the roads built for cars.

[nehal3m]

Sure, industrial scale transport and personal transport share a rolling platform with an engine, but they're different platforms with different requirements, different economics and different lifecycles.

However, you're making my point for me. If you fail to invest in good public transport it will suck. That is downstream from designing your society around cars instead of transportation for everyone. Bikes do not work for extremely long distances (although school children here will happily pedal 10km to school and back on the daily), but those long distances are a requirement precisely because infrastructure is designed around cars. Even so you can take bicycles on trains and use them for last mile transport at your destination, or store a bicycle at your destination train station (most have lockers or guarded storage) if it's a commute.

Regarding bad weather; if winter is bad enough for bicycles to fail, then certainly it is not safe to drive either, and lethality is orders of magnitude higher. Generally though people here ride bike paths that are shovelled and brined just as the roadways are.

Bikes have their own infrastructure that they do not share with trucks. It is for human beings only.

Here's some reasons to hate cars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umgi-CbaSRU

[CityOfThrowaway]

> Regarding bad weather; if winter is bad enough for bicycles to fail, then certainly it is not safe to drive either

This is a big claim with no justification.

Cars have dynamic traction control, internal temperature control, etc. You may get frost bite on your bicycle, but almost certainly not in your car. Having four wide wheels makes the vehicle radically more stable.

Add seat belts, air bags, etc. cars have far more safety features than a bike can.

Of course, cars go faster and going faster increases lethality at the limit. No argument there, far more people die in cars in general. But specifically concerning weather, cars allow people to do many things that a bicycle cannot.

Not to mention general comfort. Being in a bike in a snow storm is very unpleasant!

[lazyasciiart]

> Regarding bad weather; if winter is bad enough for bicycles to fail, then certainly it is not safe to drive either, and lethality is orders of magnitude higher. Generally though people here ride bike paths that are shovelled and brined just as the roadways are.

Extreme hot weather and pollution are both a much bigger health risk for bikes than cars.

[dpark]

> industrial scale transport and personal transport share a rolling platform with an engine, but they're different platforms with different requirements, different economics and different lifecycles.

What does this mean? This feels a bit like a distinction without a difference, as the infrastructure built is shared by both.

> although school children here will happily pedal 10km to school and back on the daily

How flat is it there? I can’t imagine a typical kid biking 10km each way around me. I feel like the average kid at my kids’ school would take 45 minutes or more to bike that distance.

[camgunz]

This is a pretty large amount of words to burn down a straw man.

[empyrrhicist]

That's a really rude and dismissive take - the impact of cars has been immense, in particular the ways in which they've been given primacy as a mode of transport and the ways in which that necessity has interacted with our laws and infrastructure development (sabotoging of public rail transport, parking regulations and the creation of car-dependent suburbia, pedestrian safety, highway projects decimating communities of color, etc. etc. etc.).

To blithely state that nobody could make such a claim seriously is an attitude which actually has a really fitting term: carbrained.

[code_for_monkey]

I would say that seriously, so there you go, theres two.

[cucumber3732842]

It's a turn of phrase. The belief isn't being called unserious. The holders of the belief are. It's the "white collar speak" approved way of saying those people are dumb or otherwise not worthy of consideration.

"I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that stone applied to fibrous asphalt is not a fine roofing material"

"I do not know anyone who seriously thinks that 4000kcal/day is healthy in normal circumstances"

"I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that women are incapable of working outside the home"

"I do not know anyone who seriously thinks a bright red suit is appropriate for a funeral"

And on and on and on.

But we both already knew that. So if you're gonna be obtuse and not understand it I'm gonna be obtuse and explain it.

[recursive]

I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that one could just say "I don't know anyone who seriously thinks" something, and that would constitute a persuasive argument. :)

[_DeadFred_]

Wasn't one of the surprising upsides of cars that incidents of incest went down dramatically? There are odd/unexpected non-logistics upsides.

[ButlerianJihad]

My parents made a home in a nice suburban neighborhood, where today some good restaurants and a coffeehouse are in walking distance, and grocery shopping is a short car ride. Yet we grew up still rather attached to neighborhoods further away, where our schools and grandparents lived. There was no possibility of bicycles or “kid power” to reach there; Mom and Dad always, always drove us everywhere!

Today I find myself in an urban hellscape without owning a vehicle. Nothing is walkable. I am crammed in, thanks to Equal Housing, with immigrants and people of utterly alien races and cultures (I consider myself the minority.) If I expect to find people like me or shop within my demographic, nothing is adjacent and it’s all several miles worth of transportation.

Car culture and forced integration has fragmented every possible family unit that could have been cohesive or collectivist. If I am celebrating a religious or cultural festival, I can count on none of my neighbors sharing that celebration, or in fact raising conflicts on the days most sacred to me.

Anywhere I may choose to walk, or even if I drive, I am trudging through vast empty parking lots of asphalt because of cars. The roads are laid out for cars. A cop told me yesterday I shouldn’t drive my e-scooter at 17mph in the street but on the sidewalk. Every motorist also hates those scooters, whether in motion or properly parked. Every motorist also hates the light rail train and hate for Waymo is fomented by motorist and pedestrian alike.

There is no place I could move to or live that would change this equation in any useful way. I do not hate cars, but I hate what they have done to our lives and our landscape.

[littlexsparkee]

I get to feeling this way when I look at pictures of neighborhoods that have been leveled for the car and what it's done to the civic fabric - e.g. historic black neighborhoods in Oakland, eminent domain in SF, etc. It hurts thinking about what could have been every time you hear of a road death or have a harrowing experience on foot/bike.

[d3ckard]

Disputable. One could argue that artificial nature of US cities (i.e. lack of centuries of accumulated decisions) were bigger driver of this than cars themselves.

[masfuerte]

I've always lived in walkable cities. I don't own a car and with pollution, congestion, accident risk, pavement obstruction, etc. other people's cars unequivocally make my life worse.

We can argue about whether this is a good trade off, but the claim that cars make everyone's life better is straightforwardly false.

[ctoth]

I live in a walkable city. I cannot drive because I am blind. Cars make my life better. Uber exists. I use it to get many places that I otherwise wouldn't go to.

[shimman]

Yes it's a widely known fact that prior to cars blind people only stayed in a single room for their entire lives. It was only due to the motorized auto carriage could blind people finally ride around and experience the world! Pretty cool!

I wonder how the Uber driver feels about not being considered a full time employee and unable to have affordable healthcare and a nonexistent retirement plan. Hopefully they don't think too hard about it or that would be incredibly selfish of them.

[lazyasciiart]

This doesn’t contradict or respond to the comment you are replying to in any way.

[TaupeRanger]

Troll post? No, they do not "unequivocally" make your life worse. "Other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living and society that you apparently take for granted. You can choose to ONLY look at the negative impacts, but the comment as stated is ridiculous.

The only way you receive food (except from your backyard inner-city garden?) is through people DRIVING. The way you receive packages is by DRIVING. They city infrastructure you enjoy is maintained through skilled laborers and tradespeople DRIVING.

[eloisius]

There's a difference between personal vehicles and special purpose vehicles like ambulances and delivery trucks. I don't think anyone in this thread is saying all automobiles are bad, but car-centric development is definitely bad. You don't have to theorize from first principles about this. There are many places around the world that aren't as locked into the personal car as the US is, and they are still functioning societies where you can receive food, packages, medicine, workers maintain infrastructure, etc.

[lossyalgo]

In fact, the cities which are repeatedly rated as having the highest quality of life are almost all not car-centric.

[tpmoney]

But is that a function of the cars or a function of the urban density? One imagines that the suburban and rural areas that are rated highest quality of life are almost all car-centric

[lossyalgo]

Cities have existed for much longer than automobiles have and have somehow prospered since millenia. I don't think the recent invention of automobiles has anything to do with proper functioning of cities.

[TaupeRanger]

People travel to ALL of the jobs you just described in...wait for it...personal vehicles. And sure...there are places in the US that are not as car dependent, and places around the world that are just as car dependent as many US cities. The post I replied to said that other peoples' cars are "unequivocally" making their life worse, which, as I pointed out, is complete nonsense.

[PsylentKnight]

Troll post? You state that "other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living, then go on to talk about things that trucks do, not personal vehicles

[Marha01]

I don't think it's possible to clearly separate personal vehicles from commercial ones. The technology is the same. Any regulation that tries to ban the one while allowing the other would be a huuuge clusterfuck.

[pocksuppet]

You, personally, can't tell the difference between someone's car and a delivery truck?

[panzagl]

Maybe it's only this way in my suburban US area, but no.

[PsylentKnight]

> The technology is the same

I mean sure, they both have engines and wheels, but they're already distinguishable in the eyes of the law. Commercial and personal vehicles are registered separately

Anyway, I don't think anyone is proposing banning cars. Just would be good to provide alternatives

[Supermancho]

> Anyway, I don't think anyone is proposing banning cars.

Following the conversation, the subject has not ever been a yes/no referendum on cars.

It was if there has been a moral net positive/net negative for vehicular technology (as a comparable technology to AI)...which has consistently been walked back to a nebulous "personal vehicles are a net negative because of how they make people think". That's eerily close to the views on AI today.

[sensanaty]

> I don't think it's possible to clearly separate personal vehicles from commercial ones

What? Of course it is, you can easily impose rules that apply to personal vehicles that don't apply to public transport, logistical vehicles or emergency vehicles.

As an example in my neighborhood in the Netherlands, there's basically no streets around me where personal vehicles are allowed, but there are no restrictions to buses, delivery vehicles, moving vans, or ambulances.

> Any regulation that tries to ban the one while allowing the other would be a huuuge clusterfuck

How? You don't even have to go fancy with specialized license plates or anything like that, it's literally just common sense.

[bdangubic]

> it's literally just common sense.

if that is lacking (often is) $50,000 fine per incident will take care of it

[masfuerte]

I said cars not driving. Yes, the supermarket needs trucks to deliver the food. It doesn't need cars.

[lamasery]

Ambulances: good. Trucks: good. Busses, even: good.

Cars? Waaaay less clear they're net-beneficial.

[TaupeRanger]

Traveling to work in a personal car to get to the job that requires you to drive an ambulance: apparently bad? Likewise driving to your trucking job? Also bad? To the grocery store workers? Also bad? To the operations and support employees that provide your internet, your email, every app you use, the water treatment plant, your local government, the restaurants you order from, your insurance company. Yes...getting to work and allowing society to run at levels of efficiency required to support the population is very clearly beneficial.

[lamasery]

The broader effects of designing the world for car-efficiency wipe out the individual benefits, for most people. Exception for those who can afford to be driven around by others.

I was skeptical too the first time I read this kind of argument. I ran the numbers for my case, which was sitting around the median (commute duration) or significantly better than the median (household income, car cost) for relevant numbers, for my car-dependent middling-costs US city, and it was still roughly break-even without even factoring in not being able to make commutes double as exercise time.

I had to have a car. My life would have fallen apart without it, that's how big a benefit it apparently was. Yet if I actually examined what was going on, it wasn't providing any real benefit to me at all, just negating harm done by designing my city around cars. That's how the numbers worked out, much to my surprise. For most residents of that city it was worse, the city being designed for cars was making their lives worse.

[PsylentKnight]

The problem is that all the infrastructure that cars need (roads, parking lots) makes everything WAY further apart. For example, downtown Houston is literally like 25% parking lots by area. And that's not even counting other car infrastructure like roads. So to some degree, cars are just satisfying a demand for transportation that they themselves create

Denser, less car-centric areas are more economically productive than less dense areas. Car infrastructure prevents density. So I would argue that, at least in some cases, cars decrease economic efficiency

[Marha01]

> "Other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living and society that you apparently take for granted. You can choose to ONLY look at the negative impacts, but the comment as stated is ridiculous.

THIS! I am shocked that some people don't realize that modern civilization and our modern quality of life depends on cars to a huge degree, even for people don't personally drive. Such a lack of knowledge about modern industry and logistics..

In aggregate, benefits of cars outweight the cons for 99% of people. Perhaps if you live right next to a busy highway, you might the the exception..

[Kbelicius]

> THIS! I am shocked that some people don't realize that modern civilization and our modern quality of life depends on cars to a huge degree, even for people don't personally drive. Such a lack of knowledge about modern industry and logistics..

I'm more shocked that somebody thinks that modern civilization and logistics depend on personal cars. Can ypu expand on your statement that modern industry and logistic depend on persobal cars?

[Marha01]

The distinction between personal and commercial cars is too small to allow effectivelly banning one while keeping the other. Any country that tries to do so will inevitably overshoot in one of the directions: either the ban will be too permitting, so people will still use personal cars, just less as today, or the ban will be too broad, which would negatively affect the commercial or logistical use cases and the economy will suffer.

[lossyalgo]

I don't think anyone is arguing about banning ALL vehicles, much less all personal vehicles, but rather to simply become less car-centric. Most cities which top the list of highest quality of life worldwide all have fairly good public transportation options and/or are very walkable.

[Kbelicius]

Ok, so i guess that personal caes don't play any huge role in modern civilization and its logstics so i was right to be shocked by your statement.

[TaupeRanger]

Obviously true, but apparently we're in a hornets nest of anti-car coastal folks here? Very strange comment thread overall.

[MisterTea]

> I don't agree - they have some negative effects

The problem is we are numb to it. 40,000+ people are killed in car accidents every year in just the USA. Wars are started over oil and accepted by the people so they can keep paying less at the pump. Microplastics entering the environment each day along with particulate from brakes, and exhaust. Speaking of exhaust: global warming. Even going electric just shifts the problems as we need to dig up lithium, the new oil. We still have to drill for oil for plastics and metal refining, recycling and fabrication.

[throwway120385]

They have a net positive effect for every owner, except that they seem to facilitate and encourage ways of living that require automobile ownership as a condition of adulthood in most places. So I'm not entirely sure they're a vast net positive in every value system. In yours, yes, but not in mine.

[mwigdahl]

Ironically, AI facilitates self-driving cars, which promise to _reduce_ the need for private automobile ownership.

[nradov]

There is very little connection between ownership and who does the driving. I still want to own my own cars even if a computer does most of the driving. That way it's always available, and more importantly I can keep my own stuff in it.

[mwigdahl]

And you should be able to. But people who don't want that or don't have the means to afford it can have the benefits of automobile transport without the capital expense.

[nradov]

Consumers can already rent or lease automobiles. This is an operating expense, not a capital expense.

[Gigachad]

Rental cars are expensive because they are covering the risk and increased wear and tear of rental drivers. As well as the downtime of when the car is rented to you but you aren’t driving it.

Self driving cars would make this massively cheaper and remove most of the reasons to own a car. It would make about as much sense as owning a train for most people.

[gosub100]

Yep just like how massively cheaper housing is to rent, right?

[Gigachad]

I use cars more like I use a hotel. Inconsistently on demand when PT doesn’t cover the route I need.

If I bought and sold a house every time I needed somewhere to stay on holiday, renting would be massively cheaper.

I’ve already done the math and uber occasionally is cheaper than owning a car. Self driving electric will be even cheaper.

[littlexsparkee]

how are you going to compare cars with no fixed location premium with housing? also utilization is totally different - cars sit ~95% of the time, housing can be nearly round the clock if you work at home. transportation is more like a utility/commodity whereas there are so many personal factors for where to live.

[next_xibalba]

Automobiles are one of a key pillar of logistics. Getting things (food, medicine, construction materials, etc. etc.) to and from backbones like rail, harbors, airports etc. So even for those who don't own a vehicle or even want to own a vehicle, automobiles are still a vast net positive.

I'm not sure what the alternative would be. Maybe everyone lives in giant 10 million+ population cities that are all connected to each other by rail (and rail connects all airports, harbors, etc.) and then you have to show up at rail station to get your groceries or whatever else?

[californical]

Personal cars are not the same as using them for logistics.

Yes cars/trucks/busses are still useful overall and are an incredible last-mile solution for freight.

But on a personal level, it means we all must live far apart and maintain our own individual vehicles, along with the average total costs of $11,500/year PER CAR. [0]

I’m not saying they should’ve even been banned for personal use - owning a car and living in a rural suburb should still be an option, but it is very expensive to choose that lifestyle.

However the auto companies on the early to mid 1900s had heavy influence on policy, even buying and shutting down their public transit competitors, converting cities into “car cities”. This is where it drove into “negatives outweigh the positives” territory. Everything before that was more positive, but this was a massive negative on society and continues to handicap cities today, making them expensive and even just dangerous to walk around (due to high speed roads and limited sidewalks)

[0] https://www.nerdwallet.com/auto-loans/learn/total-cost-ownin...

[lamasery]

The amount of space in US cities (broadly, out into their sprawl) that is used up by cars is incredible and serves to make other modes of transportation (to include things like busses, even) less-useful and make cars on-par with or worse than things like bicycles once you take out the time spent traveling these inflated distances, ~50% of which distance typically exists because of cars, and the time spent working to pay for your car, to say nothing of then needing to dedicate more time specifically to working out (or just accept being less healthy) because you're not walking or bicycling as much as you could be in a world where cars hadn't sprawled everything really far apart with gigantic parking lots, half-mile-diameter highway interchanges, large barely-used front lawns to provide distance from unpleasant and loud roads, big unusable "green space" buffers from highways, et c.

Once you start really marking how much nothing you're driving by even in many cities, where that "nothing" is one or another use of land that exists solely because of cars, it's a bit of a shock. "Wait, work would only be 8 miles away instead of 15 if not for the effects of widespread private car ownership? The grocery store could be 1 mile instead of 3? And I spend how much time a week bicycling to nowhere in particular to make up for sitting all day long? And this car & gas & insurance costs me how many of my work-hours per week, just to pay for it? Hm... am I... losing time to cars!?"

[next_xibalba]

You don't get highways and the interstate system if vehicles are not for personal use. And if you don't get those, you don't get the modern logistics system.

I guess what I don't understand is, given the current state, 1) what do you want? 2) how much will it cost? (and how will we pay for it?) and 3) what are the tradeoffs?

On a related note, it seems like a lot of the anti-car/urban planning wonks have a belief that everyone really wants to walk, ride bikes, or take mass transit everywhere, and I think they're wrong. Most people want to drive personal vehicles.

Maybe if we lived in a world where mass transit had very strictly enforced behavioral norms, more would consider it. But even then, I still think most people prefer the many conveniences afforded by personal vehicles.

[californical]

I guess instead of answering your first three questions, I’ll say this:

Our world would be better without being completely dependent on cars. You can see this in a few select cities or neighborhoods that have avoided the worst of car dependency. There are still suburbs, but they’re a bit more dense and you can easily bike to a grocery store in 10 minutes. There are still rural suburbs, but it’s much more expensive to live there due to the extra effort to get where you need to go.

There isn’t an easy way back since we let the auto industry have such a huge influence in politics, they’ve shaped the world, and it would take us decades and a LOT of money to revert the damage. We can still make steps.

HOWEVER, to bring the point back, we’re still in the 1910’s auto industry with AI. Are we going to let the AI industry get heavily involved in politics and shape our world into a worse one to benefit them? We’re at a point where we can reap the benefits, like with early cars, without the damage that came later

[Marha01]

> Personal cars are not the same as using them for logistics.

Yes, they are in fact, the same. You cannot introduce such massively useful technology into the world and then say that it would be used only for logistics and not for personal transportation. Short of a worldwide totalitarian government, such arbitrary restriction would be completely unenforceable.

It is possible to shape things with regulation, but only to some degree. With any great technology, you have to take the good with the bad. And the good outweights the bad in any historical technology. AI will be no exception.

[next_xibalba]

Exactly. These arguments are all buttressed by the "if everyone would just..." argument [1]. In fact, everyone will not just. And so if you want to build your Utopia, it will have to be compelled by force.

[1] https://x.com/eperea/status/1803815983154434435

[lamasery]

Sure, on your own land, just like you can drive more-or-less whatever you want as long as you stick to your own property, today, including vehicles that aren't "street legal".

On public roads? No reason we'd have to license private cars for that, at least not for just any purpose.

[Marha01]

How about the fact that any country that tries to ban private ownership of cars would completely fall behind in all car-related technologies, infrastructure and services, which would very soon negatively affect all those commercial or logistical use cases that our civilization vitally depends on?

Trying to ban all private cars while keeping our car-dependent civilization working is unrealistic, no matter how you look at it.

[Earw0rm]

We pretty much did with aviation.

[Marha01]

Our civilization does not depend on aviation very much, it's a specialized service. If all planes disappeared tomorrow, we will weather it pretty well. Cars are a completely different animal: they are ubiquitous and don't really have an alternative in many cases.

[alnwlsn]

I think it's most obvious in hindsight, probably it was a long time (some decades) before cars were understood to have much of a negative effect at all. Nobody* thought much about air pollution (even adding lead to the gasoline) or climate effects, or what would happen when cities were built enough that they were then dependent on cars, or what happens when gas or cars gets expensive.

All they saw was that trips taking a day could now be done in an hour and produced no manure, and that meant suddenly you could reasonably go to many more places. What's not to like? A model T was cheap, and you didn't even need to worry about insurance or having a driver's license. Surely nobody would drive so carelessly as to crash.

*well, not technically nobody, but nobody important.

[acdha]

If you read the period news, pretty much everything except lead poisoning and climate change was well known by the 1920s. Rich people wanted cars but a ton of places had resistance from everyone else to what they correctly recognized as removing the public spaces they used and shifting externalities to, for example, the people being hit by cars.

What’s really interesting is that you can find newspaper columns in the 1920s recognizing what we now call induced demand as even by then it was clear that adding road capacity simply inspired more people to drive.

[bilegeek]

That's also part of the problem. People back then had other systems to make those critiques (or their job didn't require the travel it does now), and now they don't. If alternatives don't exist, and most US people today have never experienced them, there's no demand for them, and you realistically can't expect that demand to come without a massive, grinding slog.

Lack of alternatives + political unwillingness to provide them + lack of political pressure to provide them + the massive effort that would be needed to build a system from scratch that has already been dismantled, and infrastructure is in the way because it wasn't a factor + corruption, democratic decline, etc. = most problems around cars in the USA.

[acdha]

There's a lot of fear in that for sure. Cars cost the average American household something like 20% of their income (for low income this can be over 30%) so a ton of people would benefit from alternatives, but most people are thinking “if the bus is late more than a couple of times, I‘ll lose my job”. One of the interesting things I've noticed is that there's a lot more social excuse for car problems (which code middle class) than transit/bike problems, and it's interesting seeing how often people who are chronically late to work due to “unexpected” traffic get a free pass compared to the alternatives.

Remote work was the biggest upset to this system in generations but that's being stamped out at many organizations.

[spprashant]

The positive effects were immediate, and measurable. The negative effects are delayed, and hard to quantify without all the advancement in climate research since then. If everyone in 1920 knew a 100 years from now there would be climate crisis to reckon with, perhaps a few things would have changed along the way.

Today we have a much better understanding of the world, so we have the means to think down the line of what the negative effects of LLMs and course correct if needed.

[mynameisbilly]

We did know in the 20s. We knew in the 30s. We knew in the 40s. We absolutely knew in the 50s (oil industry funded their own studies on this). We knew before we decided to direct billions into a federal interstate highway system that bulldozed countless communities of color and killed many cities' downtowns and sense of connectedness.

I don't see anything positive about being forced to participate in this car-ownership game where 99% of North American cities are designed around car ownership, and if you don't own a car you're screwed. I don't WANT to own a car, I don't want to direct countless thousands of dollars to a car note, car maintenance, gas, etc. I want the freedom to exist without needing to own an absurdly expensive vehicle to get myself around. There's nothing freeing or positive about that unless all you've ever known and all you can imagine is a world in which cities are designed around cars and not people.

[thfuran]

It was pretty well established scientifically in 1900 that increasing atmospheric CO2 would result in increasing global temperature, but I don't think it was really in the public awareness for many decades. "Global warming" wasn't coined until the '70s.

[asdff]

Negative effects were immediately noticed. The change in smog was apparent. Road laws rapidly advanced. Road building standards rapidly changed. Congestion was also very much apparent, and the reason behind massive highway building effort that came some thirty years after the car's rise to popularity.

Really these people decades ago had a great grasp on these things. But why did they "fail" and we still have traffic? They didn't fail really, what failed was implementation not planning. Most cities you see with notorious traffic today, chances are the bottlenecks that exist were planned to be relieved by some midcentury road plan that was for whatever reason, not ever built. Comprehensive rapid transit was often also planned, several times over, but not built or at least never to the full scale of those plans. Catalytic converter was also a great success people today probably don't even think about. You can see the mountains again in California's cities thanks to the catalytic converter.

Leaded gas took longer, but I'd say the tailpipe pollution, congestion, and general capacity related issues were well understood.

[Gigachad]

They failed because traffic can’t be fixed by adding capacity. The inefficiency of cars will mean you can never build enough roads to keep ahead of consumption.

Traffic gets fixed by getting most people to use some other form of transport and leaving cars to the edge case uses.

[asdff]

Sure traffic can be fixed by adding capacity. Demand is ultimately finite. You see this in places like the midwest where there is overcapacity on the highway system and you can go a mile a minute across the region pretty much at all hours of the day.

[Gigachad]

For long distance highways sure. But not commuting routes in cities.

[nradov]

Nah. We have no means of predicting the long-term effects of LLMs. Major new technologies have always caused effects that were completely unpredictable during the early phases. Any claim that a much better understanding of the world allows for thinking through the effects is pure hubris.

[hackable_sand]

Yeah, completely unpredictable

No possible way to know

[seer]

I think the right term for highways or most other car roads is “car sewer” - you need very specialised equipment to navigate them, they are deadly, smelly, loud and unpleasant. One of the worst environments humanity has produced.

Yes they ship people around somewhat fast. Slower than possible with other methods, and the cost is incredible - economic (much more expensive per passenger than almost any alternative), political (they inherently divide people, dehumanise and make people never really share a public space), health - they reduce lifespan by both lowering living quality as well as directly killing a staggering amount of humans per year).

And we have learned how to build better places for humans that do not need these coffins on wheels - if you visit any European capital, and most Asian ones - you will see environments built for humans, not cars - soo much nicer.

So cars as a technology have definitely not been beneficial to humanity overall, but it has been somewhat useful to some.

I think strongtowns were very good advocates of what places in America could like if you look beyond cars. I personally like the “not just bikes” channel though.

[estimator7292]

What benefit do cars provide that public transit doesn't? How are thousands of individual cars better than light rail?

Cars aren't a positive in society. Transportation is the benefit, and cars are the worst possible way to transport people. A functioning public transit system is better in every possible way apart from egotistical arguments like "I don't like seeing poor people on the bus".

[gosub100]

I don't like urine puddles on the bus or train seats. How egotistical of me being repulsed by human waste.

[ButlerianJihad]

I've used public transit for the better part of 50 years, including inner-city buses and light rail trains in several cities. And I've literally never, ever seen nor felt nor smelled an actual "puddle of urine" on a seat. Yeah, sometimes the seats were kinda iffy or damp; perhaps someone spilled a drink there. There were often people eating, or even drinking a beer on board a bus. So I often see pistachio shells or a discarded bottle/can behind a seat. But human waste is unheard-of.

But any actual urine "spills" would've gotten cleaned up right quick. They simply don't tolerate that stuff. Look at any bus operator and they are tough as nails if someone tries shenanigans.

In fact, the craziest times I've had were in ride shares and taxis. I was all dressed up for a funeral one morning, summoned a taxi, and the driver who tried to pick me up was obviously drunk. Another time, I had a medical transport that was summoned, sat at some gas station for 15+ minutes, and when he arrived at my place and I got in the back seat, it was wet and had clearly been through a hasty cleanup, and I could smell urine permeating the vehicle, and it was absolutely nuts, but I said nothing, because it probably wasn't the driver's fault. Probably.

[globular-toast]

Not for everyone. If everyone tried to use a personal car at the same time it wouldn't work. It's also worth bearing in mind that when people talk about "the automobile", what they're really talking about is the roads. Automobiles are useless without roads, and there's only so much space.

A lot of this comes down to having too much of a good thing. We are really bad at detecting when we've gone past the point of too much, and we're even worse at undoing it once we have.

[tikhonj]

A large part of the effect that cars have come from massive subsidies and policy choices that push for cars over alternative options. The comparison shouldn't be "cars vs literally nothing" but rather "car-dominated infrastructure vs the same investments in alternatives". (Not to say that it's an either-or; the optimal equilibrium might still involve some mix of car investments, just far less than we have now.)

[archagon]

I'd say commercial automobiles probably have a net positive effect. (Though their impact on pollution and climate change can't be discounted.) But daily life in walkable and public transitable European cities is so, so much nicer and healthier than in most American cities. I'd trade ubiquitous personal automobiles for that in a heartbeat.

[asdff]

There's still plenty of cars in europe. Biggest advantage of europe is even the major cities are only so large in footprint, like even berlin is barely over a dozen miles across. Major US cities could be 40-60 miles across. Greater LA maybe over 100 miles across depending on how you measure, all contiguous development. The northeast corridor is nearly contiguous urban/suburban development over a ~450 mile snake from washington dc to boston. Makes a little 10 mile rail line in berlin capture a much greater share of potential trips within the berlin urban area than a 10 mile rail line pretty much anywhere in the US. LA has a light rail line that is over 50 miles long.

[rdiddly]

The benefits accrue to the owners of the vehicles. The negative effects are externalized onto everybody else.

[Miraste]

It's not at all clear whether automobiles were a net positive. They are more or less solely responsible for climate change (even emissions not directly from motor vehicles wouldn't be possible without them), which may prove to be the worst mistake in the history of technology.

[Gigachad]

They have some positive effect in some situations but the overall effect has destroyed cities and made people fat and isolated.

Kind of like how fat and salt are good for you until you over consume. The world has massively overconsumed cars.

[mason_mpls]

one trip to Amsterdam will show you how bad our use of cars has been for us

[intended]

No - as a society we cannot say that its a “vast net” positive. The externalities that harm the commons are not accounted for.

We (or lobbyists) resist having carbon costs included in the prices we pay at the pump.

Edit: More transportation is good; I am not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, just that our accounting for costs makes things look better than they are.