The radical experiment of constructing our society entirely around single occupancy internal combustion engine vehicles has failed. Lets go back to the old ways.
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
And in this matter, the "old fuddy-duddies" are the ones who want to keep the new, aberrant patterns of development and transportation that became dominant during their lives, possibly arguing to hot-swap the ICEs with EVs while keeping all the new highways and sprawling developments, and young people want to revert to the patterns of development from over a century ago with car-free infrastructure.
Even in 1960 80% of households had a car: https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans.... Even in 1925 it was over half. There isn't a generation in American history where most people lived in a city and took public transit. In the 1920s and 1930s when that was common for people living in cities, half the country lived in rural places.
There has never been a time in US history where the majority of people living in rural counties were farmers. The USDA estimates that the population of rural counties who actually work in agriculture peaked at around 40% in 1950, it's now more like 14%. Most people in rural areas live in towns, and they shouldn't be forced to own cars either.
The town is still tiny and walkable, but having a car is essential because you can't feasibly organize your life around staying in town. My wife didn't live on any of the surrounding farms, but her best friend did, so without a car she couldn't visit her friend. Half the kids at her high school were from the neighboring town (neither town was big enough to have a high school for themselves), so without cars those kids couldn't visit each other. And kids in the other town couldn't visit the Pizza Ranch or the movie theater, which were in my wife's town. There was no mall or major retailer in town, so on the weekends the kids would cajole some adult or older teenager into driving them to Sioux Falls South Dakota, which is about an hour away. That is also where the nearest Costco is. Back before cars, people in those rural towns were cut off from modern amenities. They made their clothes at home, didn't buy mass market consumer products, etc. Most of them don't want to go back to living like that.
And in reality, it wasn't practical to organize life around the town alone even back then. Before cars--even in 1920 more than half of American households had a car--they rode horses to access stores and amenities in neighboring towns.
- live in a town
- keep car in a garage in the town
- retrieve car only when you need to go somewhere outside the town
Of course alternatives aren't free either and sometimes they may not be worth it. But I disagree with the idea that it obviously doesn't make economic sense to invest in any alternatives once you've purchased a car.
That's #2
>And in this matter, the "old fuddy-duddies" are the ones who want to keep the new, aberrant patterns of development and transportation that became dominant during their lives,
That's #3
It’s not funny at all how condescending almost hateful people this comment is to “conservative” viewpoints. Quite an assumption you make.
Rural (>80% conservative) populations cannot function without cars. So yes, they get concerned when government makes it more difficult / expensive to have cars. That said, I don’t think most have an opinion on city transportation. They take trains and buses like everyone else from what I’ve seen.
That said, this article is a fluff piece. For context, these cities had a massive amount of pollution from the horse poop. The argument to allow vehicles was literally to solve the horse issues. More than that, it was also argued in a free society everyone should be free to move as they wish. Horses weren’t even mentioned in this article…
Why do you believe that? Nothing prevents small towns to have good public transport, especially between closely related towns. In my country, which still has a good proportion of the population living in villages, it is very common for the villages to have small "buses" (10-20-seat or so) driving around between common destinations between different parts of the village or neighboring villages. These often have somewhat informal routes, since people who use them typically know each other and the driver. Of course, getting kids to school and back can be achieved by similar means.
Then, even relatively small villages often have a train station, which even if offering infrequent service, is typically enough to transport people to a nearby town or city and back - especially for work.
Also, people in these communities are often working in agriculture, so they do have access to larger vehicles that they control or own for the more infrequent situations where they need to transport larger payloads that would be impossible or too hard to transport in buses/trains.
Few things:
1. Most European countries are paying 100% more taxes.
2. Europeans have their defense budget (30-40% of US spending) at like 5-10% of spending. The US protects Europe, so…
3. At the end of the day that means countries in Europe have something like 200-300% of the budget for the public over what the US has.
4. The US is very spread out and very wealthy by European standards. There are massive super markets around town which a bus could get to. However, we have 0.5-3 acre yards here. The bus isn’t going to stop at every house, so you’re looking at a 2-3 mile walk to a stop.
5. Why walk and waste time at a bus stop when I can get a car ($5k-100k in price) and drive myself. Saves me hours of waiting a week, totally worth the investment and quality of life boost.
6. The density of homes means the cost of a bus would be astronomical in comparison. Buses around single family homes, when everyone has a car, on a regular basis simply don’t economically make sense. You’d have no one to pick up.
7. Regulations and what not make it a non-option. Many states regulate emissions and what not, which negatively impact the cost-benefit analysis in rural / suburban regions, already running with low number of passengers.
And I’m sorry you feel that the pro-coup, pro-Dobbs, pro-demonizing-gay-people party isn’t as well liked as you feel they’re entitled to be.
Lol wtf?
I’m saying I think it’s wrong to assume rural folk care what people in the city want to do. Most rural people are pro public transit that I’ve met. They just need cars where they are at, so they don’t like the idea of regulating it heavily such that they MUST move to a city.
> Rural areas account for 14% of the US population
Well over 70% of people need cars to transport themselves and others. Public transit is not practical in the suburbs either. Electric cars might and busses work to a degree, but the overwhelming majority of people need vehicles. At least based on the current suburban layout.
They shouldn't. And neither should the urban planners have veto power of the planning and transportation policy of rural areas. Yet in my experience, these conversations never stop at "I want my urban area to be less car focused". It always seems to extend to "I can't wait until we ban cars everywhere"
I dont think "resistance to (specifically) quick change" accurately describes how most conservatives or non conservatives use that term, not the political/social groups generally see as conservative.
Affinity for "old ways" is absolutely part of what "conservative" is. Conservative movements aren't about a gradual move towards atheism or whatnot. They're about maintaining such traditional beliefs forever, as a rule.
Let's leave partisan politics out of HN, shall we? Plus, the "conservatives" you are referring to have never believed that "old ways are the best ways" in relation to technology. They're not making some kind of exception for cars.
> The radical experiment of constructing our society entirely around single occupancy internal combustion engine vehicles has failed. Lets go back to the old ways.
What does that even mean? Ban non-electric cars? Ban all cars? What old ways?
it is all over HN already, and you just like it better when people talk in code words that make you comfortable.
Just because it's all over HN doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do better. From HN guidelines: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
"Conservatives" also don't want to abandon our "radical experiment" with settled agricultural society to go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. I think maybe you don't have a workable definition of "conservative" in your head.
And given that it was progressives of the time who radically reshaped the American landscape around what they then viewed as an egalitarian and liberating technology, it's pretty rich for their intellectual descendants to blame "conservatives" for their mistake.
I bet that in 45 years the conservatives are going to be the ones arguing to keep some social networks alive and the progressives will be pursuing closing them down because they ruined society. (or something like that just as comical)