Hacker News Reader

Comment by baggy_trough | Hacker News Reader

That spending pattern means that automobile transportation is very valuable compared to alternatives.

Or it means oil and automobiles are lucrative industries with huge amount of influence.

The reasoning of "we spend a lot of money so it must be good" is just bad. No, we spend a lot of money on stupid shit all the time. Both historically and currently.

I don't think people are as foolish as that when spending large amounts of their own money. There must be a good reason for it.

The reason is they have no choice. Consumers are the bottom of the totem pole.

Americans spend on average 15% of their gross income on automobile transportation. That's not including their taxes that went towards said automobiles, roads, and oil.

Nobody actually wants to do that. If you could get to work without an automobile, you would. But you can't, can you?

Automobiles are parasidic in nature. To work, they require vast amounts of space and sprawling urban design. But when you get said vast amounts of space and sprawling urban design, then automobiles are the only thing that makes sense.

That's my point. Automobiles are much better than any other alternative.

We have a car centric built environment because people have rationally decided for many valid reasons that automobiles are the best way to get around. It's not because they are "parasitic", whatever that means.

Mass transit can be just as good as cars for most people at far less cost. For many people transit because it can avoid congestion and go faster than cars (even on an uncontested highway) transit should be better. However transit is lacking the network needed to make it that good.

Note that a large part of why cars are better is the network exists. If you had to drive on dirt (not even gravel!) roads that became impassible when it rains you would call cars a bad way to get around. However the road network is such that you can nearly anywhere in a car.

I would just propose that the transit advocates concentrate on that goal ("Mass transit can be just as good as cars for most people at far less cost") in one small area, because in most areas in the United States, it is currently extraordinarily far from reality.

Also, they should do this without crippling cars, since that would be far easier to do than producing a compelling alternative to them as they currently exist.

> Also, they should do this without crippling cars,

Do you mean without continuing to give them 99% of available resources? Cars are by far the most privileged form of transportation worldwide. We bend over backwards to subsidize them as much as possible at all costs.

So of course, any attempts at clawing back at least some of that privilege are met with outrage, e.g. bike lanes.

99% of what resources? That sounds like quite an exaggeration.

I don't know if cars are subsidized more than mass transit on average. It's quite possible they are. The overwhelming majority of people find cars much more useful and enjoyable than mass transit, and politicians have to provide people with what they want to some degree. It's not a conspiracy of the oil companies.

Most who look like transit advocates in reality are not . They appear to be for transit but they want something else and don't care about transit.

A good reason for a SUV in a city is a pretty subjective matter so I don't think that alone is a good argument.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com