[killerstorm]

I don't think the pressure of the auto lobby is really the reason.

People feel cars are more convenient and more prestigious than riding on a bus. Car lobby certainly accelerated the process, but car users were the main driving force.

[CalRobert]

The auto lobby invented the word jaywalking to shift the liability for dead pedestrians from the people doing the killing to the people doing the walking.

The US also had protests when drivers killed kids, but they were ultimately unsuccessful, except for the odd traffic light installation. https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-baby-carri...

Even in Amsterdam the original "stop the child murder" protests only barely succeeded, and it took a massive oil crisis and a population that could still (if only just) remember what life was like before cars took over their city to get there.

[foxglacier]

Uses change and laws need to keep up. Lobby or not, jaywalking is a reasonable thing to be illegal because when cars became common enough, walkers in their way caused an overall loss for everyone. People also used to be allowed to walk on the train tracks freely when trains were slower and more obvious - did the train lobby invent the word "foamer"? Should we make rail corridors train-free? Computer hacking became illegal during my lifetime to shift liability for faulty software and incompetence from the operators to the users. Before that, it didn't really matter because nobody was using the internet for anything important. Friends used to hack each other for fun. Bitcoin used to be a wild west where people would openly steal from or fool each other for sport - I don't think people really saw it as money or property when you could just generate it with your computer.

[kubb]

Surely people feeling that way can be attributed to the industry?

[mdp2021]

For hopefully most people, it should be attributed to the "Wait, now I have such a freedom and power?".

Opposite to "before the invention of bicycle, people married within a radius in the order of the mile" (can't remember the exact stat right now).

[ZeroGravitas]

It's like that feeling of power you get from owning a gun that you only bought because you feared all the other people who owned guns.

[mdp2021]

Comparing freedom of movement to a killing device is beyond any threshold of plausibility. And the whole sentence above is unintelligible here.

No, it's really that the ability to move at ease is priceless.

[ZeroGravitas]

Car crashes kill roughly as many Americans each year as guns.

If you add pollution impacts, cars double the yearly deaths of guns.

[mdp2021]

> Car[s...] kill

And in a Cost/Risk/Benefit computation, cars remain incommensurately invaluable. Because one's Quality of Life without them would simply be destroyed, comparatively. The moving "castle" (legal term in the USA) can be more important than the house in crucial regards.

The point attempted at post 48501189 remains unintelligible. That cars imply risks and externalities does not clarify it.

[killerstorm]

Cars were quite desirable in Soviet Union, where industry was not allowed to advertise. You had to get into a queue to buy a car, the state was not interested to make them in a quantity to satisfy the demand.

Very few people actually _needed_ cars as soviets built adequate public transport system. But there are many situations where car can really help a lot. Perhaps that's more obvious in a society which has rather few cars.

E.g. back in Soviet days and around that only one member of my extended family had a car. The rest of the family were really happy about opportunities it provides. E.g. with a car you can buy fresh produce directly from farmers with just few hours of driving. Doing the same without a car is so much hassle and effort people just won't do it, and then you're confined to what's available in a local grocery story (which was usually much worse than direct-from-farmer option). Do you think it has something to do with "car industry"?

[inigyou]

Nobody is complaining about cars existing but about mandatory-car cities and the mindset associated with that.

[kakacik]

No its much more straightforward, but I get it - there is no warm fuzzy feeling of discovering yet another global evil conspiracy out there set to get all of us.

We are family of 4 with 2 small kids. Whenever we travel, its a series of backpacks, other bags, other stuff, and then some more. Heck, even if I travel alone its almost never just me - there are heaps of garbage to dispose, big shopping bags to bring back, big backpack with camping or climbing or skiing gear etc.

It would have been absolute, utter nightmare to do this over public transport. This comes from European who has generally very good public transport (given rural area) and world's best train network specifically (Switzerland). Yet roads are choke full of cars and every year there is more.

Public transport simply ain't cutting it for anything but the simplest use cases, ie just me and nothing or small backpack. Some routes I take would take 3-5x longer with public transport, or are just not possible at all. No industry massage required here, ever. Not everybody lives in some dense city and never leaves outside for evenings or weekends.

[CalRobert]

Switzerland does have roads choked full of cars. It also has pretty mediocre bike infrastructure.

But this is kind of besides the point - even in the Netherlands I also would use a car if I were taking camping and skiing gear with the kids, and that's fine. But I can also take them in the bakfiets to the grocery store when I want, and that's also fine. Cars have their purpose, but you shouldn't _have_ to use one for basic trips.

[kakacik]

Well, here is where we differ - what is basic trip for you may not be basic trip for me or next Joe. Maybe they don't even have walking path to their house. Maybe closest grocery store is 5km away on roads which are incompatible with safe cycling (many parents don't give a fck and just ride, throwing a tiny little dice with every truck passing centimeters from them and their young kids at high speed). Maybe XYZ.

Don't judge others in some complex situation just because in your case there is some simple straightforward solution. Yes Netherland has top notch cycling infra but thats nowhere else to be seen and won't be seen for quite some time. And don't force your solution unto everybody regardless on fit, that doesn't work long term (aka EU approach to things or why much of eastern part hates it).

[willlma]

Yes, people who live in the countryside need cars. But just because that's the case doesn't mean that the auto industry has nothing to do with the development of transit and cycling infrastructure in cities. I too am from Switzerland, but I lived near a train station (I now live in the US). When I'm there, I would much rather take the train than the car for most trips. It was an eight-minute walk to the station and the train is usually faster or the same duration as driving and I don't need to drive (which sucks; I'd rather read a book or look out the window than stare at the car in front of me). In the past, I owned an Urban arrow bakfiets which would fit my child and wife and me all at the same time with our groceries.

So yeah, you live in the countryside; you're in the minority, but you're trying to make global claims about the car industry based on your experience. For most humans, getting in the car involves bumper to bumper traffic to get somewhere, then 10-30 minutes of searching for a parking spot, and not having the infrastructure to make that a choice rather than a requirement in densely populated places is unacceptable.

And it's well documented in the US that the oil industry knee-capped public transit and train systems.

[inigyou]

Yeah, when you travel. But wouldn't it be cool if school was just down the block and a grocery store was the same distance the other way? In big city Europe, it's like this.

[kortilla]

It’s privacy vs not. It doesn’t really need special lobbying

[kubb]

I’m sure that isn’t the full answer. Otherwise car ads wouldn’t be necessary and more affordable cars would outcompete the expensive ones.

There’s the utility component, the prestige factor and other things.

[somenameforme]

Oh man what a perfect example to be had here. So historically exactly what you're said is 100% what happened. By the time Ford really mastered manufacturing, he managed to get the price of the Model T down to $260 around 1925, about $4,600 in current terms for a premium car!

Needless to say everybody was buying one and he was rocking it. Then came along General Motors and they were desperate to find any way to compete. They couldn't compete on price or quality, so their CEO is credited with inventing planned obsolescence, and turning cars into a fashion. They'd release a new style each year alongside plentiful marketing implying that the old styles were outdated, and it was wildly successful.

So yeah, needless to say people have always genuinely wanted their own cars. But it's also true that companies have managed through advertising to create artificial demand for vehicles that don't objectively make sense. To some degree reality is catching up at least though. Aston Martin is on the verge of bankruptcy and BYD is the largest electric car company in the world, by a wide margin.

[lan321]

Comfort, utility, fun, status. Every person has their own mixed requirement of those that then gets applied to their budget. Expensive for me is probably cheap for our CEO and cheap for me is probably expensive for our interns :)

[masklinn]

> Car lobby certainly accelerated the process, but car users were the main driving force.

Not really. We know it’s not as much of a natural force as some would like it to be because there are places where the lobbies lost, and while cars are common and widespread they’re nowhere near as dominant as they are in, say, the USA.

NJB’s next video (currently available on nebula) is about exactly that, Amsterdam’s (/ De Pijp’s) resistance to cars and car lobbying.

[hylaride]

Subsidies played a huge role, including the eminent domain bulldozing of cities for free-at-use highways. If people had to pay upfront for those costs, the urban landscape would look much different (probably closer to Japanese cities, which do have massive suburbs, but centred around train stations).

Yet Japan does still have cars (and a car culture even), they're just not necessarily the default or dominant mode of transport.

[masklinn]

Sure, nobody is saying cars are useless or unfun, I'm just pushing back against the idea that everything car everywhere is a natural and intrinsic outcome from cars existing. As I noted, even in the netherlands cars are common, the dutch have a very dense road network, and a fair amount of cars.

[hylaride]

I think we're on the same page.

For me, cars are a perfectly fine mode of transport, but the way so many places prioritize it over alternatives (whatever the reason) isn't necessarily better.

My "wtf" moment was 20 years ago when I was visiting my cousin in an exurb and we sat in a line of cars for over 40 minutes waiting for our turn to pick up her kid. The messed up part was that while there were school busses, everything was so spread out that the bus ride for them would have been over an hour and then another 20 minute walk from the arterial road drop-off point to their house. Everything was far away, including local public parks.

[killerstorm]

My view on this is based on situation in Ukraine: Ukraine definitely didn't have any car lobby at least until 1990 as Soviet Union was heavily investing into public transportation and did not profit from car sales.

Still, general opinion on cars was that you should buy one if you can, even if you're not going to use it for commute.

I doubt there was any car lobby in independent Ukraine as national car makers were just bad, and foreign were competitors. But general opinion on cars got to a point where not having a car when you can afford it (and can learn to drive, etc.) is considered weird.

So I'm afraid car dominance is just what happens naturally in a capitalist environment, and countering it requires an effort - e.g. eco-conscious population, urban planning and public transport optimization, etc. And Netherlands is such a country, as far as I know, but it just doesn't happen by default.

[Chu4eeno]

Isn't Not Just Bikes some US expat/biking maximalist?

I'm not sure I'd take him as some neutral authority on the history of cars and driving in Europe.

[chriswarbo]

> Isn't Not Just Bikes some US expat/biking maximalist?

According to their videos, they prefer trams within cities; generally take trains between cities; and acknowledge that cars are very useful for places which aren't so well connected (e.g. places that are far apart which aren't on a train line). They think encouraging the use of cars within cities is a bad idea (dangerous, scales poorly, makes those areas less pleasant to be, etc.).

Not what I'd think of as a "biking maximalist".

They do show themselves cycling to places that are nearby. Does that make Youtubers who record videos in their car "driving maximalists"?

[Chu4eeno]

I wasn't very familiar with the channel, sorry.

Not US expat either (or not yet), Canadian.

[masklinn]

> Isn't Not Just Bikes some US expat/biking maximalist?

You should really ponder the sanity of asking if a channel called “not just bikes” is a bike maximalist.