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Comment by oldbbsnickname | Hacker News Reader

Automakers are also directly and/or indirectly responsible for the destruction of American local mass transit and the dysfunctional regression in urban planning* towards inefficient suburbanization.

* It wasn't unplanned. It was the purposeful design of city planners who failed to take into account unintended externalities including gridlock, pollution, and cost.

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Car-centric urban planning has massing (mostly hidden) negative externalities:

1. Cars are discriminatory: only licensed 18+ (and not too old) can drive. A whole demographics of children+teens+disabled have lost their mobility independence.

2. Cars robbed children of they street. Street should be a social place for humans, not a car storage space and a race track for rat runners.

3. (UK) 50% of car tripes are less than 1 mile. If these motorists had the option of cycling, everyone (pedestrians,cyclist,motorists) would be better off.

4. Much more....

Cities should be for people not machines. Cars should be treated as guests in our social space, not first-class citizens with cyclists and pedestrians having to tiptoe around cars.

Some links:

https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNRnKXd9sHE (Sam Balto Bike Bus)

Melissa & Chris Bruntlett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoSdNTwizHQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVhYcJH_m5o (Watch as 100s of Kids & Parents Bicycle to one Amsterdam School)

Don't forget how transportation has been one of the key areas of conflict for racial integration and has been used again and again to ensure that black and brown people did not have access to certain areas of cities.

Robert Moses being the most egregious direct example, but Plessy v Ferguson enshrining racist segregationist laws around transportation which then provided precedent to spread to other segregationist laws.

In India, we have segregation based on cast. In cities, the caste based segregation is not very visible though local politicians usually have much better idea. The government used to do income based segregation or its employees: low income group or LIG homes, HIG homes, etc.

Is racial segregation was by design (100% non Whiltes) or just happed due to economic factors (majority of non whites happens to be in this category)?

Racial segregation was literally in law for a long time. When it became illegal, none of the underlying things that had become inherent disappeared overnight.

As an example, banks refused to lend in minority neighborhoods, so unlike for white Americans who used loans to bid up houses owned by white Americans and got wealth that way, Black Americans actually experienced negative housing wealth growth. Those areas are still poor, but now banks don’t lend in them because they’re not profitable, even though the reason they are not profitable is that they were never lent to in the first place.

When Black people managed to build parallel financial systems and economies to provide them wealth, usually they got their properties burned down or firebombed for their trouble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

I’ve heard several times but never verified that trees aren’t planted on boulevards anymore because of automaker lobbying. Something about drunk drivers might hit them. As if driver preference, even drunk drivers, should supersede the public interest.

I've also read that drivers drive faster on streets without trees than those with because they feel more open

The same is the case with islands between lanes. The lanes aren’t actually smaller, but they feel smaller because the space looks like it’s contracting.

And they’re much nicer in a neighborhood than speed humps

Can you point to a book or other resources that support this claim? Interested in learning more. Always looking for another reason to hate cars as a New Yorker

I'm reading "The Geography of Nowhere" right now, it covers much of this in a reasonably entertaining fashion, although its not chocka-block with references.

It does make some predictions that haven't dated well though (like hitting peak oil in 2023)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Nowhere

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Strong Towns hy Chuck Marohn

AskHistorians Jake Berman covered this in his podcast "Public Transport in North America"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D6HDTu5LYmk

Apparently it's not as black and white as many in this thread would suggest.

"Who Framed Roger Rabbit" is a great introduction, its characters are fictional but the story is somewhat true.

So you are telling me the local NIMBY who protests new homes is actually the auto industry in disguise?

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