Hacker News Reader

Comment by bm3719 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe everyone shouldn't have a car anyway. Turn on the satellite layer in Google maps sometime, and you'll see how it's affected everything about how we organize society. Life for most humans is just sitting in various boxes only accessible by car, interspersed by car rides between them.

We're a species of motile organisms. Not only do we have legs, to not use them is actively unhealthy. If we're going to just sit in chairs all the time, we might as well get rid of all this useless leg biomass and redesign our houses and offices accordingly.

It's worse than this though, because that's just the physical dimension to our existence. The car is a mediating apparatus that alienates man from his social field. Man is a social animal, and needs sociality to maintain mental stability. If there's always a car between you and members of your own species, intersubjective experiences will simply occur less, which is exactly what happened when everyone got one.

View on HN

>Life for most humans is just sitting in various boxes only accessible by car, interspersed by car rides between them

And a hundred years ago life for most humans was just sitting in various boxes only accessible by walking, or horse if they were rich enough, and there were far fewer boxes to choose from.

There isn't always a car between members of our species and intersubjective experiences happen more often than they did prior to mass transit because cars allow for greater range and more efficient travel, and thus access to more people and more experiences.

There are entire cultures that have developed around cars and car ownership that facilitate bonding and community between individuals.

I'm all for reducing automobile usage and creating more walkable environments but the premise that cars primarily serve to alienate and isolate people seems wrong on its face.

All this is only true in the singular relation sense. The car has had a scattering effect. It's made the suburb possible. Most of our family members and past friends are scattered all over due to the car's existence in the first place. If not for the car, most of them would be right in your village. Not only would they be clustered in your immediate vicinity, but they would be inextricably integrated into your village life, creating a deeper social connection with your community.

The car casts every social group that temporarily forms to the wind. When you go visit your distant relative 3 hrs away, you only have that genetic connection left. You've lost the multiplicity that would've existed otherwise. The car gives, sure. That's why we ended up with them. But it also took away, and some of those costs were secondary, transitive, or hidden.

That isn't the cars fault in that sense. Compare a lot of Europe with a lot of America.

Both locations have cars.

Exceptions in both locations prove some rules.

Do you have a vehicle?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com