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Comment by armonster | Hacker News Reader

Their negative effects are much more vast, subtle, and cultural. You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people. It has created an expensive barrier of entry for existing in society and added a ton of friction to doing anything and everything, especially with people. That's not even getting into the climate effects.

The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.

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The best way I've ever heard it described is that in a car-dominant society, every new neighbor in your neighborhood is somebody in your way, taking up your spot, making you late in your commute.

The psychological effects of this are enormous and under discussed.

And in a public transport-dominant society every neighbor is also someone in your way, taking up a spot at the restaurant you walk to, filling up the subway train and therefore making you late in your commute…

There’s no free lunch. Doesn’t matter where you are, more people = more crowds.

Humans are pack animals, not flock or herd. I think going beyond the Dunbar number is possibly the thing making people grumpy in highly dense areas. If people cannot know those around them in a meaningful way, do they even view them as human?

What kind of meaningful connections can you make when you live in a city with a a large transient population and are surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people on a daily basis, come on now. People can only have so many friends and acquaintances. Just because my neighbors live across the street doesn’t mean it’s impossible for me to talk to them. I have about a half a dozen people in the neighborhood I know well and have work acquaintances and long term friends. Which is plenty. This whole suburbia is isolating thing is being a bit dramatized here, sheesh.

In a much less visceral way. You can always let one more person on the subway.

Being stuck in traffic is a daily physical reminder of the zero-sum nature of car-dominated societies.

I think a lot of it depends on personal opinions on what society should be like being treated like objective truths.

Yes exactly. Let's simplify it to the individualist vs collectivist spectrum.

Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).

In the car centric places, a few generations later they become an indelible aspect of nature. It is impossible for most people to imagine society working otherwise. And even when they do, the collective action problems are near insurmountable. The introduction of technology has irreversibly trapped us in a way of thinking we can't escape.

This is exactly the premise of the Amish religion. You must strictly control technology to create the society you want, not the other way around.

The thing is, the Amish don't try to tell the rest of the world that their way is the "obviously correct" way and that everybody else is doing it wrong, the way anti-personal mobility advocates do.

THIS. But the car/oil companies did do bad things like work to undermine public transport & EVs back in day. Now we have sprawling burbs & social isolation. Phones, death of 3rd spaces & church going, etc. made it worse as people stopped having bigger families, leading to even more isolation.

“Anti-personal mobility” is beyond absurd, absolute loony-bin stuff.

“Anti-personal mobility advocates” do not exist. Transit advocates exist, and improvements in transit also massively benefit those who need to or prefer to drive.

Most motorists absolutely hate e-scooters and e-bikes. They hate them with a white-hot passion. You will never see more road rage than against a scooter when I ride it in a traffic lane. The scooter goes about 17mph, and with 3+ traffic lanes available to cars, they will pile up behind a scooter, scream out their open windows, honk and cut me off, and spit in my face: yes literally spit all over my face, because they hate personal mobility so much.

Motorists hate anything that isn't a car and is in their way. Motorists hate Critical Mass; they hate light rail or streetcars that hog their rights-of-way; they hate pedestrians (especially when pedestrians aren't wearing the right clothes); they hate Lyft, Uber, and Waymo especially; they hate big trucks and they hate Amish people with horse-drawn buggies.

Motorists will establish coalitions to vote against public transit measures in their home towns. They have come out in City Council and other public meetings, to protest and rail, so to speak, to rail against the expansion of light rail into their neighborhoods, because not only do they hate the construction, but they hate the "type of people" that light rail brings, and ultimately they hate the gentrification that comes from a fixed-route project that will ultimately close their shitty exploitive businesses and replace them with more elevated exploitation and richer moguls.

I assumed comment is referring to people that advocate for transit as “anti-personal mobility”, they are counting cars as the only “personal mobility” which is beyond laughable.

e-scooters kind of sit in an uncanny valley of shittiness. I'll upfront say it's not at all fair to anyone using them responsibly, but there's a lot of cultural baggage that is going to make them uniquely reviled compared to alternatives. For instance, I've longboarded all around the city of Dallas for years and nobody has ever honked at, cut me off, or spit on me. But temporary rental scooters with no permanent docking station carry with them the stigma of:

- People riding them on sidewalks to putting pedestrians in danger

- "Parking" them right in front of someone's gate, blocking the entrance to their house

- Obviously drunk partiers using them in lieu of getting a ride or taking the bus

- Groups of them sitting around half knocked over completely blocking a sidewalk or other pathway meant for cyclists, runners, walkers, and other pedestrians

Fair or not, you're like the kid using a razor scooter at the skate park. Nobody likes you but it doesn't mean they hate everyone at the skate park. They just hate scooter kids.

Yeah I do not think there are any serious transit advocates that put time into advocating for e-scooters. They are worse and more dangerous than bikes and e-bikes in every possible way.

And any bike lane infrastructure would benefit e-scooters anyway, so riding them in the road at 30mph below the flow of traffic is a sad hill to die on.

> drunk partiers using them

at least in England, if you use an e-scooter while under the influence of alcohol, that equates to a motoring offence whereby incurring (car) driving licence penalties, driving licence disquaifications (bans), fines, and imprisonment all apply, depending on circumstances and severity. I'm not sure if/why it would be different anywhere else

In most places you don’t need a drivers license to drive one.

As someone who's canvassed on transit and bike mobility issues before, I think you've spent too long in online urbanism circles. There's a kernel of truth in what you say but it's exaggerated and victimized way too much. Your examples are also pretty textbook online urbanism and ignores other vulnerable road users (motorcycles, mobility scooters, etc)

No, in fact, my assertions are wholly based on in-person interactions with motorists, in conversation and on the roads. I’ve literally been spit upon and road-raged, and many voters and taxi drivers have expressed their sheer hatred and opposition to public transit.

My assertions have nothing to do with “online circles” except here where I am breaking the bad news to y’all.

If you haven't spent time in "online circles" then why is your understanding of vulnerable road users and non-car options limited to only bikes, light rail, and Critical Mass? What about rail trails projects? Does your area follow any NACTO guidelines? How does your DOT/DPW see things?

I don't deny the general idea that motorists in the US tend to have a crab mentality on the road where they want and expect everyone in the road to only be other drivers. I've also been sneered at in various ways in every non car form of transit I've been in.

If anything, the commenter's circumscribed scope of discussion only reinforces the point that they are informed by personal experience and not the internet echo chamber. Whereas you are throwing out these gatekeep-y acronyms to establish transit advocate street cred.

In my town the issues are rail trails and kids dying on e-bikes. Are my opinions on rail banking invalid if I don't know all the rules about wheelchair access ramps at the station? Come on now.

If you're going to post something as contrarian as they did then yes. Cars are popular and the American built environment is oriented around them. You might not like it, but nobody will take your seriously if you don't acknowledge the status quo.

The exact set of topics they brought up are very online. I may be wrong about their experience with urbanism but it literally looks like something out of r/fuckcars

Or they're just one of the many people who experienced a similar "what radicalized you" moment.

This type hate is part of the status quo with cars. I've been on both sides of it - there are times I catch the entitlement building within myself as a driver!

It's the folks pushing cars that are both the most strident and the most successful at pushing their "obviously correct" way onto everyone, at least in the US.

Cars are not popular becuase people pushed them. Cars are popular because the utility is undeniable.

This is true for any kind of transformative technology. Marketing and lobbying can only get you so far. If something has enough utility, it will be used regardless of what people say they want.

> Cars are not popular becuase people pushed them. Cars are popular because the utility is undeniable.

I think this is somewhat of a chicken and egg problem. Cars' utility is undeniable partially because society has twisted itself thoroughly around The Car being an assumed part of it. This societal change was both pulled (by car customers) and pushed (by car manufacturers).

Yes absolutely—I think cars have obvious utility as machines, but there has now been 100 years of building everything around them and changing laws in such a way that encourages their use: through direct and indirect subsidy, land use rules that largely outlaw building cities in any way other than sprawl that itself increases the importance and utility of cars, and various other preferential regulations that often tolerate the harms in a way that is not applied elsewhere (c.f. panic over e-bike safety vs American highway safety overall).

Cars won because they were (and are) better than the alternatives. The need for powerful individual transportation with utility has always existed, and was originally met with horses. Bicycles meet the transportation need, but not the need for utility. Cars do both, and they do it better than anything else. Even before fueling infrastructure was rolled out, you could still run a car on petroleum you bought from the chemist, which is still infinitely better than the acres of pasture you need for horses. If you had an early diesel, it would run on oil, which is even easier.

The idea that cars needed all this infrastructure that other alternatives didn't just doesn't match the reality of the history of the automobile. And yes, we've leaned on those advantages in the century since, which has also created vast areas where a car is necessary to participate in society, but we only did so because the advantages and utility were so undeniable.

Robustly advocating for your opinions is not an act of oppression.

The advocates of the automobile have been far, far more successful at shaping US society, laws, culture and our physical environment.

I imagine that’s also true in many other nations to a lesser extent.

And at some point, maybe it makes sense to ask why, instead of blindly accepting and propagating the hive-mind party line exhibited in threads such as this one.

I don't think a armonster was quite claiming it to be "obviously correct". But rather taking it for granted that this a valid hypothesis:

- We would have gotten most of the social utility of automobiles, without most of the social negatives, if personal vehicles had mostly never happened.

And implied from that, we should stop having them now.

Given the known ills of society, I think those negatives are pretty uncontroversial. To the point that personal car proponents have some burden to explain why we should keep it up.

it is kind of hilarious to hear people just keep making the same arguments as ted kaczynski

Neither Ted Kaczynski nor Senator McCarthy were wrong, even if we can criticize their ways and means.

Crazy that someone would use this pseudonym while at the same time saying that all society's problems are caused by socialist and Communist conspiracy.

what was Senator McCarthy right about?

Ted Kaczynski specifically was advocating for primitivity, no?

You mean the brilliant mathematician with the correct insights into the modern American condition?

> Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).

Something I recently learned about roads from Stewart Brand's new book "Maintenance" is that the first groups pushing for paved roads were cyclists:

  The Good Roads Movement of the late 19th century began as a grass-roots 
  crusade to improve roads for bicyclists. By the 20th century, it had turned 
  into a national effort embraced by the automobile industry, railroad tycoons 
  and presidents.

https://www.governing.com/context/how-gilded-age-bicyclists-...

>personal opinions on what society should be like

Anyone who still even has a personal opinion at all pertaining to what the world should look like distinct from swallowing whatever 'the market' has decided to impose on them is worth listening to.

That's the most interesting thing about the situation of technology today. Most technology is banal, what's notable is that apparently now a culture needs to be in possession of 'objective truth' (no such thing exists) to defend what is, by definition, a subjective way of life.

I don't think it's fair to say suburbanization lead to isolation. I think factors like social media have had a much bigger impact.

It's not like you're living away from any people - you have 100 other neighbours living on your street!

Proximity doesn’t automatically result in interaction, though. If every one of those 100 people get in their private mobile room every time they leave their private mobile room there is no chance for any of them to interact.

100+ years ago, certainly more people lived in rural areas. In Canada and the US, pre 1900s, it was something like 70% of the population was rural.

Cars came in parallel with a lot of change.

The upsides of automobiles, or personal mobility in general, are enormous. I can go wherever I want, whenever I want along with other people and cargo. I don't have to wait for a schedule set by someone else, or worry about union strikes. I love my cars!

Those are all enormous benefits to you and you alone. The greatest thing about cars are the things they do for you.

In order for someone else to have those benefits, they also need a car.

If as a society, if we could feel the same way about public transit, bike lanes, sidewalks, that you do about your own personal vehicle - we'd be better off.

It's the toxic American hyper-individualist mindset. As an American, I hate it so much.

Hyper-individualism goes a long way in eroding racism and sexism though, urging people to view others as individuals rather than members of some larger group. I’d rather hyper-individualism than hyper-collectivism. Once you consider someone first as a member of some other group, the marginalization and then erasure of that other becomes easier.

This is true, although I have to say as someone who doesn't own a car, good public transport can avoid most of those issues. I live in a small-ish city (500K - 1M pop, depending on how you count it), and I can get pretty much anywhere I need to without worrying about schedules and certainly without worrying about strikes. The biggest issue is getting out of the city - that's when it's usually more important to worry about schedules, but it's still mostly doable - and occasionally transporting furniture or something like that.

On the other hand, the benefits I get from that public transport are incredible - it's cheap, it's always there, it requires minimal logistics in groups (no trying to figure out who goes in what car and needs to be dropped off where at what time), it works regardless of my level of inebriation (admittedly I've not pushed that one to any sort of extreme yet), it's safe enough for children to travel independently (no dropping them off and picking them up), and it's largely accessible for people with difficulties walking or moving about.

I think a big part of the issue is that people have tried out poor public transport infrastructure and recognised - often correctly - that their car is way better for them. But good public infrastructure can often be far more convenient than cars, it just requires people to be motivated enough to build and finance it. A neighbour of mine didn't notice his car had been towed for a week because he used public transport so much and so rarely touched his car. When he'd parked his car it was fine, but then they needed to block of the street to do some work somewhere, and he didn't notice they'd confiscated all the cars there. That's the sort of effect that good public transport can have - so comfortable that you can forget you even have a car.

You can go wherever you want whenever you want... until everyone does this and now you are stalled in traffic with no end in sight.

There are countless use cases for point to point personal transportation not covered by public transit options.

Most of these use cases exist because of the prevelance of personal vehicles. We reach for cars because they are there. We see the world through windshields, so when problems arise we conceive of car-based solutions. Cars force us into city designs and styles of living that require cars. That is to say, cars necessitate cars.

Everyone hates cars until they need an ambulance.

Yes, obviously there are many negative externalities to a car-driven culture, but just like we can easily become blind to the diffuse societal costs of a piece of technology, I think a culture of nay-saying makes it very easy to be blind to the diffuse value of a piece of technology too.

Loud stinky cities full of pollution and climate change are obviously horrible.

But we easily take for granted how amazing it is to be able to drive to a mountain and go for a hike, or call an ambulance, or go to a restaurant when it's raining out, or safely travel in a city without risking being assaulted, etc.

Internal combustion engines are amazing and horrible.

Most people that are against car-centric cities like myself are not against cars 100% but against their level of priority in the design of our cities and societies.

Many of the scenarios you mentoned aren't even that big of a deal for many. I have walked in the rain many times and somehow I was still ok. You could argue that car culture has made us soft in some ways.

Nevertheless, if we reduced our emphasis on cars in society and the design of our cities to the point where cars were mainly used for those specific cases where cars truly are by far the best options (like ambulances) we would have more livable and walkable cities and ironically cities where it is nicer for those who really really want/need to drive since everyone and their mom wouldn't be driving because they aren't forced to drive to everything. Fewer people clogging the roads like my co-worker who would watch Netflix while she drove to work. Obviously she didn't have a passion for driving but was forced to because she lived in a sprawling metro with terrible transit options.

I agree a middle position where cities are dense and people-focused but where cars are still available would be ideal. That's pretty close to what I have here in Seattle and it's nice. I have a car and can park it by my house, but I don't use it for commuting to work.

(Well, I do right now because I'm recovering from surgery and can't walk to the bus stop. But I don't usually drive to work. Which is kind of my overall point. It's very easy for able-bodied younger people to think cars aren't necessary, but not everyone is so mobile.)

I like being able to use a car. I don't like being effectively dependent on using a car to go anywhere.

This is a willfully ignorant and wildly incorrect take. Your isolation argument completely neglects socialization with family and friends that is supported via automotive mobility. Do you also somehow have the impression that automobiles somehow forced suburbanization? I think not- you don't want others to have the freedom to choose anything other than some industrialized urban existence. The effects of the automobile are vast, subtle, and cultural- and overwhelmingly positive

I would be very surprised if you could show a study demonstrating increased use of automobiles improves socialization with family and friends.

Me going to the movies, sample size of one (big brain journal, 2026)

Urbanization has separated far more families than suburbanization, so the isolation argument, as if suburbanization is the core cause, doesn't make sense to me.

automobiles -> suburbanization -> isolation -> mental health crisis seems like a fairly easy hypothesis to test since there are still millions of people in america living densely and carless in places like nyc and you could demonstrate that they have a statistically significant gap in mental illnesses. so easy to test that i bet several people already have and you could just check.

I can tell you as a resident of New York City that the negative effect of the automobile on the built environment is very much present here as well.

for sure! but that's irrelevant to a causal chain that includes "suburbanization", since you're not in the suburbs (in manhattan at least, the walkability does drop off pretty quickly)

another interesting tack: how long did we have cars before we started talking about a widespread mental health crisis? is there a more parimonious explanation, like a different event that is located closer to it in time? perhaps smartphones or the internet?

I think you are too focused on one problem caused by cars. Even if they didn't cause mental health problems due to isolation (seen most prominently in suburbia), they cause enough other problems to warrant pushback.

arguments are not soldiers. i am specifically responding to the claim that cars leads to suburbs leads to mental health issues. i am not a partisan in the greater car wars.

You miss how this mental health crisis seemed to emerge in lock step with screentime. Not really suburbs. It is funny when people wax poetic now about the carefree latchkey adventurous childhoods of the boomers or gen x. I mean all of that stuff was little adventures happening in the suburbs. Nothing else to do inside so this is what would happen. You give that kid along with the rest of the kids in the neighborhood, well, tiktok there's your isolation and mental health crisis source right there. At least in the early dialup days kids were kicked off periodically so parents could use the landline, and there just wasn't such a bottomless well of content either to spend all waking time consuming.

EDIT: missed your other reply a few mins earlier alluding to smartphones already

That's a common narrative in popular culture (especially since the publication of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation), but it doesn't really bear out in data. Smartphones don't really have a discernible impact on mental health at a population level.

The idea is that teen mental health got dramatically worse in the early 2010s at the same time as social media began to become ubiquitous, but this is likely a coincidence. The underlying metrics we're tracking here are self-harm hospitalizations, and concerns about teen self-harm were already growing in the early 2000s. This leads to a bunch of new guidance getting published which increases teen mental health screening, tracks mental health status as a cause of injuries, and forces insurance companies to cover associated costs.

It's one of those situations where our stats about a problem increased as we became better at tracking it. Teen suicidality is actually WAY down over the past ~30 years.

Qualitative data is, of course, much harder to work with than hospitalization numbers, but the data we do have suggests a weak correlation, if any, between phone use and poor mental health— see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30944443/, which suggests phones can explain at most 0.4% of variance in well-being among teens. [1]

It feels like common sense that social media is bad for you, and sure, there's plenty of work to be done in understanding how and why social media can cause harm. But the idea that there's some big crisis just doesn't pan out.

Info drawn from https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-anxious-generation...

[1]: In fairness, Haidt published a response to this article featuring a new, bespoke set of controls for the data. His analysis suggests that the impact of social media use on mental health is nearly twice as large as that of being sexually assaulted and four times larger than hard drug use (which itself has a slightly larger effect size than wearing glasses). Personally, I don't find these conclusions plausible at all. Maybe Haidt's been p-hacking, or maybe the data set is worthless. I couldn't say. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000169182...

It is not merely suburbanization that has been caused by cars, but also the very urban fragmentation. Immigrants are no longer permitted to live in enclaves, ghettos, or the same neighborhood with one another.

Another thing about "this mental health crisis" is that it has been ongoing for many decades before we noticed it and before it was brought to the forefront. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was out and then President Reagan approved the mass closure of asylums. What happened was that massive numbers of citizens had been condemned and committed by their relatives and "put away" in homes, facilities, and institutions, and then Reagan shut 'em all down.

Today, the mentally ill live among us. Either their families care for them, or they live in jails/prisons because they became criminals and were convicted, or they live independently/on the streets. The mentally ill live now in "virtual institutions" where their chains and restraints consist of drugs. The drugs are what keep them connected to their home clinics and their psychiatrists. The drugs keep them coming back for more, month after month, to their pharmacies and clinics. The drugs they are convinced they cannot live without, making them compliant and unsure of what is really going on in their lives.

The non-criminal mentally ill are mostly encouraged to integrate and socialize, to seek employment and try to simulate functional human beings in society. So they live among us and they are causing more noticeable issues when they interact with people possessed of more sanity. The mentally ill are probably less likely to drive or own a vehicle, and more likely to rely on public transit, so you know where to find them.

But the mentally ill who live independently, and live with these "virtual restraints" are likewise living in fragmented neighborhoods that are not walkable and require a lot of effort to overcome the sheer distances that separate them from services and their employers. They're living among immigrants, foreigners, heathens and infidels, and on every corner is a moral trap such as easy alcohol, easy sex, easy gluttony, easy gambling that can ensnare even the sanest city dweller. These traps are, of course, legitimate businesses that cannot be shut down by a mere vice-squad raid.

So "this mental health crisis" in 2026 can perhaps be partly traced to the advent of personal motor vehicles, but I feel there are several causes that have brought it to the forefront.

Yes, they have. And they found it to be correct.

> living in dense inner-city areas did not carry the highest depression risks. Rather, after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, the highest risk was among sprawling suburbs

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10208571/

you have to deal with selection bias - those are presumably very different groups of people selecting into the type of environment they favor at some level, albeit aconstrained by affordability

Except rural communities are both more car dependent than cities, and have more tightly knit communities, so isolation probably isn't just a function of owning cars. Cars are probably the wrong mode of transportation for large cities, but then the question becomes: is that how we should all live, and to what extent does a better solution for the group override a better solution for the individual? Because, like it or not, cars are a better personal solution if you aren't bumper-to-bumper in a commute. I'm not going to take my dog or my surfboard on the bus or a train, and I have a life that doesn't end at the city's boundaries.

Love the car. Hate the drivers. Soon we'll be able to get 100% of the benefit of cars (anytime anywhere private transportation), with almost none of the drawbacks (time waste, safety, cost, pollution, traffic, parking).

> You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people.

Yes, you could say that, though I'm not sure who would actually say that seriously.

I would say that seriously, so there you go, theres two.

It's a turn of phrase. The belief isn't being called unserious. The holders of the belief are. It's the "white collar speak" approved way of saying those people are dumb or otherwise not worthy of consideration.

"I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that stone applied to fibrous asphalt is not a fine roofing material"

"I do not know anyone who seriously thinks that 4000kcal/day is healthy in normal circumstances"

"I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that women are incapable of working outside the home"

"I do not know anyone who seriously thinks a bright red suit is appropriate for a funeral"

And on and on and on.

But we both already knew that. So if you're gonna be obtuse and not understand it I'm gonna be obtuse and explain it.

I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that one could just say "I don't know anyone who seriously thinks" something, and that would constitute a persuasive argument. :)

Respectfully, without judgement, your perspective may be wildly skewed because you’re American (going by your post history). I suspect the negative externalities in a society built around cars don’t register with you because to you it is the normal state of the world. As a Dutchman, I grew up in a built world that is based around the human scale and to me your parent’s claim comes across as astonishingly obvious.

The Netherlands has 513 cars per 1000 people compared to the US rate of 779. A significant difference, certainly, and it's plausible that there's a threshold effect where a society built around 50% more cars faces unique problems. But this doesn't at all seem consistent with the original idea that automobile technology itself is bad.

You might think so, but a flat number comparison doesn't do justice to the vast differences in urban planning. Check out this video, it describes Dutch urban planning pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k

Car ownership is not a good proxy for how important cars are to living well in a particular place, when the places you're comparing have completely different design philosophies. If you look at how many trips the average Dutch car owner takes by car vs. how many trips the average American car owner takes by car, I guarantee you there will be a much larger difference.

I'm also not sure that anyone was claiming automobile technology itself was bad, just that in many places at many times it has been used in suboptimal and harmful ways.

I definitely agree that merely having automobiles doesn't require adopting characteristically American urban design philosophy, and that this philosophy isn't very compatible with dense walkable urbanism. But I don't see how to interpret

> The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.

other than as a claim we should not have personal automobiles.

I suppose in the Netherlands they use carts and horses to stock up the supermarket? To transport coal to the powerplant (or the wind turbine blades to where the wind turbine will be built)? Surely a bicycle isn't enough for that.

You might be only talking about personal cars, but you've got to remember that trucks share the same infrastructure cars use. Modern city wealth wouldn't be possible without engined vehicles driving on roads (maybe if you went really crazy with rail that could be exception). You take away personal cars and either the infrastructure stays or your city wouldn't be possible anymore either.

But even beyond that - personal cars provide a level of freedom and capability to the general population that no other technology can match. Trains suck, buses suck, passenger ships suck, planes are uncomfortable (but otherwise pretty good). Bikes don't work with long distances, multiple people, the infirm, winter (riding in the winter is a great way to get injured, two-wheeled vehicles don't do well with ice), bad weather, if you need to be presentable when you arrive. Oh, and bikes get stolen. Constantly.

Sure, industrial scale transport and personal transport share a rolling platform with an engine, but they're different platforms with different requirements, different economics and different lifecycles.

However, you're making my point for me. If you fail to invest in good public transport it will suck. That is downstream from designing your society around cars instead of transportation for everyone. Bikes do not work for extremely long distances (although school children here will happily pedal 10km to school and back on the daily), but those long distances are a requirement precisely because infrastructure is designed around cars. Even so you can take bicycles on trains and use them for last mile transport at your destination, or store a bicycle at your destination train station (most have lockers or guarded storage) if it's a commute.

Regarding bad weather; if winter is bad enough for bicycles to fail, then certainly it is not safe to drive either, and lethality is orders of magnitude higher. Generally though people here ride bike paths that are shovelled and brined just as the roadways are.

Bikes have their own infrastructure that they do not share with trucks. It is for human beings only.

Here's some reasons to hate cars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umgi-CbaSRU

> Regarding bad weather; if winter is bad enough for bicycles to fail, then certainly it is not safe to drive either

This is a big claim with no justification.

Cars have dynamic traction control, internal temperature control, etc. You may get frost bite on your bicycle, but almost certainly not in your car. Having four wide wheels makes the vehicle radically more stable.

Add seat belts, air bags, etc. cars have far more safety features than a bike can.

Of course, cars go faster and going faster increases lethality at the limit. No argument there, far more people die in cars in general. But specifically concerning weather, cars allow people to do many things that a bicycle cannot.

Not to mention general comfort. Being in a bike in a snow storm is very unpleasant!

There’s probably very little weather that is safe for cars but unsafe for bikes. Uncomfortable, yes, possibly extremely so. But you can bike in a downpour so severe that it’s unsafe to drive specifically because you’re not in a 2 ton deaths machine.

Maybe a severe enough snow storm? Even then we’re in Goldilocks territory for the storm to be unsafe for bikes but safe(ish) for cars.

The biggest factor is that people simply will not get on their bikes in severe enough weather. At least not in most places. Maybe in the Netherlands they’ll bike in a blizzard.

Hell, we organize championships: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMinwf-kRlA

Safe for cars/bikes, or the passengers vs the bicyclist?

Hail comes to mind. Lightning possibly (I believe cars are much better insulated against lighting strikes). High winds could easily push bikes around / knock them over where cars just keep going.

We drove our van through a forest fire (Cedar Creek Fire - a BIG one) and got a bit of smoke, but otherwise, just fine. No way would I have attempted that on a bike - the increased aerobic activity alone (to say nothing of embers / ashes / etc) would have probably caused crazy amounts of smoke inhalation / death.

And there is a reason drivers hate SOME bikers - here in CA, many simply refuse to follow the rules of the road. My light turns green, and 5 seconds later, some biker comes rolling along in the perpendicular direction - I almost hit him. This kind of stuff happens over and over. I am very fond of bikers when they follow the rules - I bike sometimes too.

>No way would I have attempted that on a bike - the increased aerobic activity alone (to say nothing of embers / ashes / etc) would have probably caused crazy amounts of smoke inhalation / death.

Riding a bicycle while wearing an unpowered respirator/face mask is surprisingly easy, especially if it has an exhalation value. It does restrict breathing somewhat, but breathing isn't usually the bottleneck when you're cycling. This might even be the optimal way to escape a fire if the roads are congested.

> There’s probably very little weather that is safe for cars but unsafe for bikes.

Any weather where the wind is >15mph will be safer in a car. Hail. 100 F days. Thunderstorms. I love walking and public transportation but holy hell the thought of biking in some of our Texas weather is horrifying.

Not to mention that my 6yo and 9yo are much safer in my car than cycling through inclement weather! Not everyone is a single individual with no children! Holy hell, the trip from a kid's bday party to my house two weekends ago would've been deadly for my kids, but in a car, the weather wasn't an issue.

> industrial scale transport and personal transport share a rolling platform with an engine, but they're different platforms with different requirements, different economics and different lifecycles.

What does this mean? This feels a bit like a distinction without a difference, as the infrastructure built is shared by both.

> although school children here will happily pedal 10km to school and back on the daily

How flat is it there? I can’t imagine a typical kid biking 10km each way around me. I feel like the average kid at my kids’ school would take 45 minutes or more to bike that distance.

>What does this mean? This feels a bit like a distinction without a difference, as the infrastructure built is shared by both.

I guess I wasn't clear in implying my doubts as to whether that's a hard requirement. Trucks are much larger and heavier which takes its toll on the road surface itself. They don't need access to suburban environments. Even in the inner city here trucks are banned outside of loading and unloading hours to foster a walk-able environment. So yes, in part they do, but it's not that black and white.

>How flat is it there? I can’t imagine a typical kid biking 10km each way around me. I feel like the average kid at my kids’ school would take 45 minutes or more to bike that distance.

Famously pretty flat, but with e-bikes gaining ground, elevation changes don't make much of a difference anymore. And yeah a 45 minute commute by bike is not unusual, but remember, we have the safe infrastructure for it. Kids bike in from villages surrounding towns and cites.

> They don't need access to suburban environments.

How are suburban environments stocked then? Surely village grocery stores are not stocked with milk one bike load at a time.

> Even in the inner city here trucks are banned outside of loading and unloading hours to foster a walk-able environment.

Sure. But they use the same infrastructure. The fact that the vehicles are built for different purposes and may have different regulations doesn’t mean the cost of infrastructure isn’t shared. Pervasiveness of roads makes it easy for cars, trucks, ambulances, buses, and even bikes to get around more easily.

Just like the pervasiveness of the Internet make it easy to scroll TikTok, purchase goods from Amazon, and read books through Project Gutenberg, even though those are very different use cases.

> Regarding bad weather; if winter is bad enough for bicycles to fail, then certainly it is not safe to drive either, and lethality is orders of magnitude higher. Generally though people here ride bike paths that are shovelled and brined just as the roadways are.

Extreme hot weather and pollution are both a much bigger health risk for bikes than cars.

There's a lot of people in this comment thread interpreting the post's analogy as "ban all cars forever" rather than "consider how to use them as part of a wider societal strategy that makes places better for everyone".

You can implement all kinds of transport badly. Trains can suck if they don't take you where you want to go, bicycles suck if wherever you live doesn't provide acceptable parking methods.

Cars are great in a vacuum, but once a city decides it's going all in on cars and bulldozes the place, they provide problems for anyone else. Buses will suck because they're stuck in traffic and walking will suck when you're getting around on the side of 3 lane highways or vast surface parking lots. Most importantly, driving will suck, because everyone has to drive everywhere, and that creates more traffic for the rest of us. You get in a doom loop where you build more lanes, which drives more vehicle traffic. If you make the alternatives more viable, people take up those alternatives and vehicle traffic eases.

It seems like a hard argument to make that bikes can suck more than cars because of parking. As a bicycle enthusiast, I can provide you with some better reasons. You'll get rained on. You'll get sweaty. The helmet will mess up your fancy hair. You can't go as fast.

Parking is one of the biggest upsides of bikes IMO.

The point I was engaging with was how urban spaces can discourage certain kinds of transport users if their needs haven't been considered. If you get to your destination and have to hunt for a nearby fence post to lock your bike to, that's a bit of friction that makes me less willing to cycle. If I know there's a nice safe, quiet route for me to take, and a sturdy rack at my favourite cafe, it's a much easier decision.

Parking is one of the biggest downsides of bikes IMO.

Bikes are great, I ride mine whenever I can. But most places lack secure bike parking and the police don't take bike theft seriously. So sometimes I drive my car even to places where I could easily ride a bike just because I'm confident the car will still be there when I get out.

Yeah, that's a real problem. For practical urban riding, I use a beater fixie that I can replace for less than a car payment. I've had a few stolen, but that's across decades. This is probably highly dependent on your particular location. But I've also had cars broken in to.

Replacing the bike is actually a lot easier than getting the windows fixed IME.

Fwiw the only place I had a bike stolen was the secured underground garage in my apartment complex. Never had issues just parking it out front while running errands or other such stuff, or parking outside work during the day. I'd figure foot traffic would keep angle grinding down. I've personally not seen angle grinding done that brazenly before, seems liable overnight though where the thief has time to work and the assumption no one is awake to hear the grinder (such as what happened in the case of my apartment).

If I can't find a good spot to actually lock up the bike though I will just bring it in to wherever I'm going. Shops or restaurants don't seem to care if a bike is parked in the corner and you can thread your ulock through the wheels and make it useless to ride off with.

> Shops or restaurants don't seem to care if a bike is parked in the corner...

This doesn't scale to wider bike adoption, though.

By that point there will be more infrastructure like more racks (and eyes on street as a result). Chances are you will be the only one doing this. But again if 10 people start doing it at once, awesome stuff for your city is coming I'm sure.

> Parking is one of the biggest upsides of bikes IMO.

I think that's true at the moment, but only because there's so little demand for it. You can always find a sign post or something because no one else is snatching them up.

At the end of the day bikes are still private vehicles and, though they're smaller than cars, they aren't that small and the infrastructure to secure them (which is integrated into cars) isn't small either. So you get the same problem writ small.

The problem is smaller and that is bad? That’s getting pretty close to the definition of better.

Writ very small, though. You can easily fit a dozen bikes into the space of one parking spot, if not more (double-decker racks exist!), and it is a lot easier to contrive a spot for your bike in the absence of bike racks than it is to park a car when there's no parking.

Heck—if you have a car & your building doesn't have parking, you're basically screwed. If you have a bike & it doesn't have a bike rack, you can just carry it up & put it on your balcony. At that point, I don't think you can really compare the two.

> Buses will suck

Buses are only workable because of cars. We build roads for cars first and trucks second. Buses are at most 3rd in the list and getting to use them is an incidental side benefit.

No one builds enough roads for buses. They have to use the roads built for cars.

Many places build dedicated bus lanes, and a few places build roads specifically dedicated to buses, like the Queensland Busway system

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

That’s cool but one counterexample does not negate the general trend. Most places have few dedicated bus lanes. Most cities have approximately zero dedicated bus roads.

Even the cited system seems to be limited and exists to connect with trains as well as buses that use normal streets. Wikipedia says that they chose buses for this expansion instead of trains specifically because there was already a strong bus system, which uses the same city streets as cars and trucks.

Horse-drawn busses predate private automobiles by almost a hundred years.[0] The movement to pave roads was started by bicyclists decades before the rise of the automobile.[1] Cars usurped preexisting infrastructure and drove out other road users, like trolleybusses and streetcars.

We have so thoroughly remade society in the service of cars that it can be difficult to recognize any possible alternative.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsebus

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement

Paved roads have been around for thousands of years longer than the bicycle.

> Horse-drawn busses predate private automobiles by almost a hundred years.

And they used roads that already existed for transit and transport. People have always built roads.

> Cars usurped preexisting infrastructure and drove out other road users, like trolleybusses and streetcars.

This is some significant historical revisionism. You’re making it sound like all the roads were built for buses and streetcars.

The good roads movement is certainly interesting history. But I don’t think it changes the reality that buses are only workable because they are mostly piggybacking on infrastructure buit for other vehicles.

Of course, that’s rather the point of roads, that they are infrastructure that benefits many forms of transit and transportation.

Roads that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years certainly weren't built for cars.

This is a pretty large amount of words to burn down a straw man.

I didn't really say what my perspective is on whether the suburbs are good or bad or cars are good or bad. I think there are plenty of reasonable arguments as to whether they are or not. What I am dubious about is that they are somehow the source of some hand-wavy "widespread" mental health issue in America.

I wouldn't be surprised if it contributed significantly because of the lack of (access to) third places [0] it breeds, but that is conjecture on my part, so fair enough.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

There's no shortage of third places in the American suburbs, you just have to drive to them. I'm sympathetic to the argument that walkable third places are better third places because I lived car-free in New York City for a decade and enjoyed many of them. But living in the suburbs or exurbs doesn't inherently mean you don't have access to shared communal spaces.

If I believed there is a crisis of isolation in the United States and degradation of community, I would first focus on more recent technologies, say ones introduced around 2007, than on technologies introduced in the early 1900s.

I would be hesitant to draw that correlation. IMO cars give you more access to third places, not less. With a car one can cover far more ground in a given 30 min drive after rush hour died down probably in every city in the world, than what one can cover in 30 mins walk and transit ride (especially when transit schedules might favor a commute into the central part of town vs some off peak trip to a random corner of town).

Say what you will about the ills of the car, but it takes a lot of specific context for them to emerge as the worst option of transport from an individual perspective. Really most of the cars ills are from their collective harms, something most can't appreciate as a tragedy of the commons sort of failing.

Yes, cars mean you can cover more ground in 30 minutes, but they also push EVERYTHING further apart. And what about parking? I can get very far on foot, by bike, or by train in 30 minutes, especially in an environment that hasn't been made artificially sparse by accomodating cars.

If anything, the golden age of third places coincided with the golden age of suburbanization, which was obviously heavily car dependent. Their death almost certainly has more to do with financialization making it harder for small businesses to stay afloat, a drop in demand due to competition for attention, and decreasing work-life balance eroding people's ability to socialize.

In my grandfather's day, one income was enough to support a household, and there was less free work being done on the job, which meant fewer hours and being less drained at the end of the day. And yes, people spent less time commuting, meaning they had more time and energy for socializing after work. But communities were also more decentralized, and population centers had fewer people in general. A big part of the problem is that modern cities can be massive, and invariably funnel people to a handful of work districts, which just doesn't scale. When you double the distance to the CBD, you quadruple the number of people coming in (give or take, it's not exact because we tend to increase density close to the CBD as a response to this). Take it from someone who's lived in a place where cars aren't really necessary, the logistics of urbanization are still a crap experience when you're crammed into a train carriage during rush hour. It's common for people to commute for 90 minutes on public transport in Asian megacities, for example.

That's a really rude and dismissive take - the impact of cars has been immense, in particular the ways in which they've been given primacy as a mode of transport and the ways in which that necessity has interacted with our laws and infrastructure development (sabotoging of public rail transport, parking regulations and the creation of car-dependent suburbia, pedestrian safety, highway projects decimating communities of color, etc. etc. etc.).

To blithely state that nobody could make such a claim seriously is an attitude which actually has a really fitting term: carbrained.

Wasn't one of the surprising upsides of cars that incidents of incest went down dramatically? There are odd/unexpected non-logistics upsides.

My parents made a home in a nice suburban neighborhood, where today some good restaurants and a coffeehouse are in walking distance, and grocery shopping is a short car ride. Yet we grew up still rather attached to neighborhoods further away, where our schools and grandparents lived. There was no possibility of bicycles or “kid power” to reach there; Mom and Dad always, always drove us everywhere!

Today I find myself in an urban hellscape without owning a vehicle. Nothing is walkable. I am crammed in, thanks to Equal Housing, with immigrants and people of utterly alien races and cultures (I consider myself the minority.) If I expect to find people like me or shop within my demographic, nothing is adjacent and it’s all several miles worth of transportation.

Car culture and forced integration has fragmented every possible family unit that could have been cohesive or collectivist. If I am celebrating a religious or cultural festival, I can count on none of my neighbors sharing that celebration, or in fact raising conflicts on the days most sacred to me.

Anywhere I may choose to walk, or even if I drive, I am trudging through vast empty parking lots of asphalt because of cars. The roads are laid out for cars. A cop told me yesterday I shouldn’t drive my e-scooter at 17mph in the street but on the sidewalk. Every motorist also hates those scooters, whether in motion or properly parked. Every motorist also hates the light rail train and hate for Waymo is fomented by motorist and pedestrian alike.

There is no place I could move to or live that would change this equation in any useful way. I do not hate cars, but I hate what they have done to our lives and our landscape.

I get to feeling this way when I look at pictures of neighborhoods that have been leveled for the car and what it's done to the civic fabric - e.g. historic black neighborhoods in Oakland, eminent domain in SF, etc. It hurts thinking about what could have been every time you hear of a road death or have a harrowing experience on foot/bike.

Disputable. One could argue that artificial nature of US cities (i.e. lack of centuries of accumulated decisions) were bigger driver of this than cars themselves.

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