I saw an article earlier today about a guy who thinks all our cities should be "walkable", which to him means removing lanes, removing parking lots, lowering speed limits, and generally making them even more of a pain to get around. This got me thinking. Quite simply, humans were not made to live like sardines in a can. We were made for open space and sunlight and thing. Densely-packed cities breed stress and anger; there have been studies on this. Thus, the automobile is a net good for society because it allows us to build out instead of up while remaining fairly efficient as a society. That's what these efficiency hacks and other "de-emphasize the car" types don't get - the wide availability of personal high-speed transportation has indeed allowed us to use space "inefficiently" and we benefit from doing so. And that's the thing - is efficiency really the highest goal in life? Do we really need to use space as efficiently as possible when we have so much unused space still left? And that got me thinking some more. So many different manifestations of leftism end up trying to kill the car. The environmentalists are afraid that we'll run out of oil or that CO2 will make the planet explode. The efficiency Nazis see the car as an obstacle to more compact cities and think it's wasteful for people to have cars of their own when they only use them for a few hours a day. The safety people are afraid of what would happen if someone actually enjoyed driving. The techno-sheep just run after every new technology (such as autonomous cars), ignoring commonsense questions about software bugs, security, ethics, and the potential for misuse by a future totalitarian government. And since the car seems to get dragged into so many of the battles of our time, car culture seems to me to be a perfectly OK place to stand up and fight back against the idiotic forces of banality and utilitarianism - the climate panickers (and climate panic profiteers), the safety ninnies, the efficiency-utilization robots, and all the other people who think life would be so much better if we could just suck all the fun out of it. And that got me thinking some more. In gun culture, there is a type of person known as the "Fudd", as in Elmer Fudd. This is the person that could not possibly care less what happens with pistols, semi-automatics, fully automatics, or anything else as long as they can still have a bolt-action rifle to hunt with, and they are universally reviled by gun enthusiasts because they're usually about as useful as a set of square tires when some manifestation of officialdom finds another way to threaten the Second Amendment. They don't think about the big picture, just the slice of it they choose to take part in. This made me think about whether there are "Fudds" hiding out in the car hobby as well, constantly giving inches on things such as emissions standards and electric cars, then not particularly caring when miles are taken. Maybe not, but I think there are some people in the car hobby who are not staying as pure as they should be. For an example, see the ALMS promoters, who invited an EPA delegation to watch the 12 Hours of Sebring. Also see the rank-and-file car guys who see no problem with downsizing, turbocharging, and size/weight/feature creep in mainstream cars. Furthermore, see the extreme "take it to the track" types who willingly daily-drive hybrids and/or rail against speeders. The fact remains that no matter your personal opinions on the environment, road safety, or anything else, the preservation of the car hobby, at least in its current form, requires that we unite on a few things. One, the governments of the world need to be as uninvolved as is practical, two, the availability of cheap, fast RWD/MT road cars must be protected, and three, the idea that cars have been a net bad for society must not be allowed to become widespread. I had a better, more conclusive, less 8th-grade-sounding post planned, but then I got tired and forgot the point.
Not necessarily. There's huge amounts of space left, and plenty of resources too; the problem is the the efficiency-utilization hacks only ever seem to insert themselves into situations where they will be unhelpful or actually counterproductive, as if their real intent was to suck the joy out of people's lives rather than to put more in. For an example, look at the "conventional" farming model, with its vast fields of one thing, its barns with thousands of mistreated animals, etc. Unlike an organic/sustainable farm which, done properly, produces excellent food with minimal MRO expenses or permanent infrastructure investment, a conventional farm ties up huge sums of capital and physical space with its immobile buildings and its single-use land areas while producing inferior food and requiring a king's ransom in chemicals, feeds, and antibiotics just to keep the whole thing from flying apart. But do you ever see the efficiencymongers going after Big Ag? No, instead, they conclude that factory farming is the only way to feed the world. Instead, you see them pushing for efficiency in the most inconvenient and annoying ways possible. Cities are too car-centric, so obviously we need to make it even harder to get anywhere quickly or find parking when you get there. Suburban sprawl is taking over the world (hint: It's not), so we have to cram everyone into the cities. Private ownership of vehicles leads to 5% utilization and that's inefficient, so we should make every car a rental (even though all that will do is use cars up much, much faster, especially when you consider that people beat the snot out of rentals with little shame - all I can say is they must be smoking some really good weed). Only when increasing efficiency would be painful, pointless, or both do they suddenly pipe up.
The first paragraph was fine. You sorta lost me in the last 2. You also forgot to indent. We have to live with non-car guys. How about they let car-guys take over the streets?
So, despite I love the new Hellcats, F150 Raptor, McLaren P1 and work on my dad's Corolla, I am not a car guy, because I think the Prius is an excellent daily driver and think that if people wanna go fast, they should do it on a track, when the only people they can hurt are themselves? Just realise that car fans are many different people and "take it to the track" is a very good thing.
I'm not entirely sure the point/message here is, it started out like an essay on pedestrian infrastructure then it was about leftism then it was about gun ownership and now I'm confused. Well, either way, thanks for sharing your opinion, Mr. Chuck, and I'll attempt to reciprocate it as well as I can. From what I see, I'm not too worried about environmentalists and the like taking over the world. They actually have a lot less movement behind them than one might think; they're comprised of a small but very, very vocal group generally backed by a conglomerate of companies hoping to make even on their carbon sins in the public image. Furthermore, this sort of deconstructive-ism isn't marketable and thus to our capitalist system, it's already dead in the water. That is, you can't really sell people on walking like you can driving. Though the most important thing to consider is the inefficiency of bureacracy. The organizations that run our cities just doesn't have the power nor the interest to tear down roads and put in bicycle paths and gardens using taxpayer money. My city, progressive as it is, has a few dedicated bike paths out in the suburbs and in parks, but downtown they just painted green lines on the road and called it a bike path. Then they wonder why so many people are door'd or killed by passing cars. Since then, they're quietly realized it doesn't really work and the bike paths thing has sort of slowed to a stop. That said, I ride my bike around the city and it is really great to have a pedestrian and cyclist accessible city to traverse; for short distances, I don't have to take a car and look for parking or whatever. The dedicated bike paths put in have high traffic, though the on-road bike paths I mentioned earlier - everyone avoids those and just uses the sidewalk. So basically, I think that like most things, a balance is needed. The car is needed to properly travel long distances in reasonable amounts of time or energy and taking that away is just harmful to infrastructure and mobility. However, having alternative modes of transportation like bicycle or just on foot is really a great thing. Sometimes a car isn't needed. Maybe we can save money on gas, cut down on emissions or whatever with some steps in this direction. Somewhere in between "four wheel paradise" and "Amsterdam alternative" seems like it would best.
I like car culture, big engines and power stalls as much as the next guy, but even I agree that it is nice to be able to save money on gas and wear and tear on a vehicle by bicycling to work sometimes. It is nice when sidewalks are incorporated into new development for those of us who can't (unfortunately) afford to drive to work everyday. I don't think there is anything wrong with letting the "green, eco-friendly" crowd have their bike lanes and crowded intercity parks as long as restrictions are not put on the people who do like to drive to work, or have classic cars. I have seen some pretty ludicrous articles from this crowd myself. I read an article a while ago that called for governments to force car companies to stop making pickups, SUV's and minivans, claiming that these vehicles are death traps to pedestrians and bicyclists because of their size and mass. This ignorant behavior really bothers me, the idea that there are people who want to ban something, just because the don't have a use for it. While many people in large cities don't need to transport 600lbs of manure, a bunch of hay bales, or lumber for a building addition, there are a vast number of people who use their trucks to transport things that they can't put into a bicycle basket, or the back seat of a sedan. Just the same with SUV's or minivans, sometimes you can't pack a whole family, or large group of people into a smart car. I have even heard the argument that people who drive a large vehicle are "compensating for something", frankly that is a poor, and childish argument, the only thing people with pickups are compensating for is the physical inability of the human body to carry 800lbs of OSB from a lumberyard to a job site in under 45 minutes. Have a nice day.
The people I'm worried about are the ones who go full Nazi about it. I've had to deal with forum admins who made it an actionable (even if rarely actioned) offense to admit to speeding on their forum, or to link to a video of someone else doing it. These people worry me because they don't seem like they could be relied upon to sit up and take notice when cops start getting 500+ horsepower super cruisers, or wearing ghillie suits to run speed traps, or using internet videos to take people's licenses away months after an offense as recently happened in Wales - thus, they become literal "car Fudds", staying silent as long as track days and sanctioned racing are not existentially threatened. The fact is, even if you toe the mark off the track, you need to be invested in making sure traffic enforcement doesn't become traffic tyranny. Like I said, originally I had a point, but then I got tired and everything I'd thought of just sort of disappeared from my brain. True, a great many people give fewer than zero rat's back ends about going green. There are a few problems with finding solace there, however. First, as you said, for such a small group, envirofascists make a lot of noise, and sometimes that in and of itself is good enough to earn some legitimacy, or at least discourage the opposition. Second, they've infiltrated the scientific community, academia, and the news media thoroughly enough to have a near monopoly on mainstream opinion sources, which allows them to hoodwink low-information types en masse and easily shout down their opposition. Third, environmentalists, and leftists in general, tend to cluster in big cities, which multiplies their power to devastating effect. Just as an example, I'm guessing many of the loony tunes that California now sings were sung first in LA and the Bay. Fourth, they have the attention of many politicians, either because the politicians are would-be dictators looking for ways to restrict movement, because the politicians are bought or blackmailed by the would-be dictators, or because the politicians are gullible idiots. I suspect you get more of the first and second reason and less of the third the higher up you go, but either way the end result is flatly insane CAFE standards and an overpowered EPA throwing around words like "felony" and "jail" with regards to hilariously minor offenses. True, that kind of stuff never does work, but every few years, some new "idealist" comes along and tries to do it again anyway. If it gained traction once it can gain traction again, so every time it comes up, the sane people of the city in question have to waste their time reminding everyone why it didn't work last time. That's the really infuriating thing about politics - bad ideas, like Terminators, will always be back. True, though despite what the walkable-cities types say, making a city pedestrian-accessible (as opposed to pedestrian-centric) is not difficult, expensive, or mutually exclusive with car-accessibility and most cities have already done it as a matter of course. It's really not even the pedestrians I'm worried about; they already have their sidewalks. Bicycles are a completely different animal and a lot harder to place. If you let them ride on the roads, they'll annoy drivers; if you let them ride on the sidewalks, they'll run down pedestrians; if you turn car lanes into bike lanes, drivers will resent the loss of space and increased congestion (especially if buses get to use the lanes as well) and as you said cyclists might get hurt unintentionally as well. Again, true, but what the proponents of alternative movement miss is that deliberately making cities harder to drive through causes massive, unwarranted inconvenience for anyone who doesn't live downtown. Residents of suburbs and outlying areas shouldn't have to bike miles, leave ridiculously early, or work around bus and train schedules just because some greeny wanted to bike to work. Let the non-drivers have their space, but don't take away from existing car space or otherwise create artificial bottlenecks to do it. Couple problems with that. First, we should know by now that the more insane greenies will not be satisfied until cars are banned entirely, or at least relegated to a sideshow; give them an inch and they'll take a mile. Second, in many cases these "green" measures, such as bus lanes, bike lanes, and carpool lanes, can easily become, in a practical sense, restrictions of the type you mentioned.
Contrary to what many people seem to think, it's possible to drive fast/have fun on public roads without killing everyone in sight. Theres a time and place.
Having fun on the roads doesnt mean driving at 100 mph in the middle of NYC ramming all pedestrians in sight. It also doesnt mean going over the speed limit at all. some people think that fast cars are pointless cause you can almost never test them, but fast accelerating cars... those are the best ones.
