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We’ve had a number of pro-car vs. anti-car arguments here on the Motte, in which both sides have made well-argued and not at all annoying arguments. I’m on the anti-car side in the sense that I personally hate driving and would strongly prefer to live in a place where owning and operating a motor vehicle is not only unnecessary but actually discouraged. Many others here are similarly disposed toward urbanism and against cars, and are far more adept at making practical/technical arguments in favor of that position than I am. The main topics of discussion in such arguments always seem to circle back to 1. Is it feasible/desirable to convert cities built for cars into cities built for walking/transit, and 2. Is a car-free lifestyle feasible for people who have multiple children. People on both sides muster the best arguments at their disposal, and few of the participants resort to cheap emotional argumentation or goalpost-shifting.
I think that perhaps you just personally find one side of that argument annoying for idiosyncratic reasons, and have convinced yourself that it’s impossible for people who disagree with you on the issue to do so for non-annoying reasons. I won’t gainsay any personal experiences you’ve had when discussing the issue in other spaces, but I can assure you that here at the Motte we are in fact perfectly capable of conducting ourselves in a dignified and intellectually-honest matter as it regards cars, and have demonstrated this capability multiple times since I’ve been here.
I'm partially in this boat regarding cars, I hate driving and thankfully do live in a place where I can currently get by without owning a car (indeed, even if I did like driving, there would not be enough reason for me to own one to justify to costs and maintenance).
One thing about anti-car vs. veganism is that while I know many vegans who quite openly say their endgoal is the abolition of meat-eating altogether, I don't know anti-car people who want to totally abolish personal cars. Most anti-car politics simply are about non-drivers being taken into account as a constituence in eg. road planning (driving lanes vs. cycling lanes vs. pedestrian lanes), more support for public transport, enforcement of traffic laws for cyclist right-of-way and so on.
Of course one can get quite silly that way, too (there's a perennial argument in Finland every autumn when it starts getting really dark with the most fanatical cyclists insisting that government's suggestions that everyone wear a reflector are pro-car propaganda since it's the drivers' responsibility to drive without hitting pedestrians and cyclists even if they don't have a reflector or reflective clothing or similar), but even still, when one's politics are about defending a specific constituency's rights, there's certainly often a tendency to go to the bat in even piddling or weird matters.
I had thought this was a totally made up demographic until I joined twitter. There are genuinely a surprising number of rabid people who are just as obnoxious as the most passionate vegan jihadist.
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This must be a selection effect or something (cf. Scott Alexander comparing conservatives to dark matter), because when I think of anti-car people, my mind immediately recalls the various people who have stated in no uncertain terms that they do in fact want to abolish cars (e.g. BritMonkey). And then I don't know what to make of the movement as a whole because they seem reluctant to disavow their more radical sections and/or improve their messaging to be more palatable to the average person.
To be fair, this isn't anything special to urbanism; I have similar problems with the trans activist movement too. At least white nationalists are honest and don't hide how radical they are.
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Are they nuts? Ireland is not as high up as Finland (I don't think, anyway) and when it gets dark in winter, it's difficult to understand that while you out walking on the road may be able to see, the person coming against you in a car can't make out shapes in the dark. And when it gets sufficiently dark, even someone walking on the road can't distinguish shapes.
Even here, in twilight (dawn or dusk) conditions, you get people wearing all-dark clothing and you don't see them until you're right up on top of them. Wearing something light-coloured, even without a reflective armband or jacket, is just plain common sense. It would be entirely possible for a cyclist to hit a pedestrian, especially as having lights on bikes seems to be a lost art these days, not alone cars to do so.
As said, this is the most fanatical cyclist section, the folks that normie cyclists like me would tend to think are ruining the reputation for the rest of them. And yes, their argument is that the drivers should just drive slow enough to be able to react to even formless shapes.
Incidentally, it's entirely possible that on the whole, even though it's more to the south than Finland, Ireland may actually be darker during the late autumn-winter-early spring period than Finland on the whole, since there's less snow to provide a natural light-amplifying milieu.
Its worth noticing that the UK highway code says "drive slowly enough that you can stop in the distance you can see to be clear" (and most other jurisdictions have a similar requirement) and explicitly points out that this is likely to be limited by the quality of your headlights at night. A cyclist not wearing hi-vis clothes is easier to see from a distance than many other things you would want to avoid hitting.
If you can't stop in time to spot and avoid a cyclist unless they are wearing hi-vis, you wouldn't have been able to avoid a tree either.
Trees don't usually travel on the road, you'd feel and hear a change in terrain before hitting a tree, unlike for a cyclist suddenly crossing your path, or appearing in your headlights after a turn on the road.
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I did learn, or at least learn to pay more attention to, one interesting fact on the last Motte pro/anti car argument I was involved in - substantial parts of the world routinely experience weather for extended periods that precludes all but the most hardy people around from doing extended outdoors work, like walking for 20 minutes while carrying a few days worth of groceries.
This is definitely a great point; I live in San Diego, with arguably the best and most mild year-round weather of any place on the planet, so it’s extremely easy for me to advocate walkability.
However, other places, both in North America and in Europe and Asia, do somehow seem to manage to have great public transit and walkability despite having intemperate weather. New York City’s weather is far worse than Phoenix’s, yet the former has the highest rate of public transit usage in America, while the latter’s transit system is pathetic. European cities with a ton of snow and rain still somehow seem to manage public transit, so it must be possible, although I can certainly see the merit of arguments that it’s quite suboptimal.
I live in NYC now, and mostly lived along the gulf coast before I moved here. One thing I have discovered is that there is a big difference between 30F and 10F. I've been told and am willing to believe there is an equally big difference between that and -10F. At 30F, you're okay with regular decent shoes, a set of long johns, a good basic jacket and a light hat. At 10F, you need (well, at least I need) insulated boots, heavy or double long johns, a heavy parka, hat, scarf unless your parka has a good hood, and mittens, and any skin exposed to the air for even a few seconds is actively painful. It's that cold here for maybe a couple of days to a week total over the course of a winter, and it's reasonable to avoid going outside during those times. At -10F I'm told you need petroleum jelly covering your face to avoid frostnip. I'm told in many places in the center of large continental areas, including the US, it's that cold or worse for multiple continuous weeks every winter. So I can totally see how many people, especially those who aren't in prime physical shape for any number of reasons, aren't eager to embrace needing to physically carry every crumb of food they eat home by hand.
I've lived in fairly hot places too, but never Phoenix. I've been told that in Phoenix, it's routinely hot enough that you are at serious risk of heat stroke if you walk outside in the sun for 20 minutes without carrying water. That's probably also worse if you need to carry moderate loads or aren't in great physical shape.
This makes me wonder how people in very cold climates where cars are unaffordable make do- my understanding is that large parts of Russia are both too poor for non-elites to have cars, and have temperatures below 10F for extended periods, and smaller portions have extended periods below -10F, and that sections of eg the Canadian Arctic are similar. How do people not die waiting for the bus in Magadan in January?
No such thing "cold", only "need more clothing".
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They only go out during the warmest parts of the day. There are good YouTube videos on life in Siberia etc.
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I wouldn't go so far as "all but the most hardy", merely "many on the bottom of the distribution". Carrying three days of groceries for 20 minutes in Minneapolis winter or Miami summer is bearable. Make it week's worth of groceries while tending to two small children, and it's misery if you're the average-sized woman.
In Singapore or Hong Kong this is irrelevant since in many cases the amount of time you need to spend outside is minimal. Even in parts of Canada (eg downtown Calgary or Edmonton) there are extensive climate controlled passages, tunnels and skyways to make sure you don’t need to experience extreme temperatures outside.
The idea that you need cars for climate control is just ridiculous. Many places have solved this problem; it doesn’t require the personal automobile.
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As I've gotten older and my joints more rickety, I can tell you that the prospect of multiple trips down to the shop (even the one not too far away) and carrying bags of groceries back is much less appealing than when I was in my 20s and 30s. "Twenty to thirty minute walk home carrying heavy bag of goods in my left hand" was okay when I was 35, now it's "Urgh, lemme see if I can shop online and have that delivered".
'No car' is great when you want to live in a city, when everything is on your doorstep so to speak, and you're doing nothing more strenuous than carrying a day's groceries like bread and milk home, there's a range of choices if you want to go out to eat instead of cooking at home, and if you need something big delivered (imagine you bought a new wardrobe) the shop will drop that off for you. (That still leaves the problem of 'no cars but we do need delivery lorries and trucks', and seeing large trucks trying to park on the streets in order to drop off goods at the stores is something regular in my town).
If you don't have a range of everything on the doorstep (and even the city nearest to me was unusual, decades back, because there were no grocery shops easily accessible in the city centre, something I never understood when I was in town and wanted to buy a few groceries rather than go out to the shopping centre on the outskirts) or if you need to carry a heavier load or bring a lot of purchases back with you, a car where you can load up or fit everything in the boot is much more appealing, even more necessary if you're not living in town or city.
I get sent to cities for a few weeks at a time for my job. I bring a small, soft-frame backpack with me, and for one man by himself it will carry anything as far as I want to carry it.
An older woman, with two grandkids? Not a chance. The problem is once you inconvenience grandma, you end up inconveniencing me, because I want my family to be near grandma, and so we all end up driving.
How do European grandmas pull it off, then?
Pretty much because many Europeans, especially in more dense city centers, and even in the suburbs (which are more dense in many cases than American suburbs) don't go to the supermarket once a week and get an ungodly amount of food. There's a local market, or at least a much closer supermarket they can stop by daily or maybe three times a week, get what they need quickly, and then go home.
I agree, it’s simply such a ridiculous thing to suggest when all across Europe and indeed most of the world the elderly are fine without needing to drive literally everywhere. The American suburb is the abomination, not the dense city, which is the norm for huge numbers of people for thousands of years.
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I think you're right, and I'll walk that one back for The Motte.
I just want to get where I am going. I've been to Singapore many times for work, and I've never rented a car there. When I get sent to our sprawling exurban facility, I rent a car every time. If you want to live someplace without cars, good for you, I hope it makes you happy. I think cars are overused, but the places with lower car use have low European salaries, American blue city crime, or Asian conformity, so I end up in car places.
I must confess my frustration comes from the broader internet. When I look at ways to swap out short-range car use for more efficient modes, I get bullshit evasive argument people, not rational arguments. There seems to be a consensus among them that operating large machines is scary and gives them anxiety, and they want rich/functional people to be forced to travel and live with poor/dysfunctional people, so that the rich/functional people will be forced to fix things for the benefit of the poor/dysfunctional (hence the hatred of the private house/car). They seem to beat around the bush and make emotional arguments though.
As I've mentioned before, they talk about the carbon costs. I have solar panels, a Tesla, and an ebike, I live(d) in an upscale New Urbanist development, and I have the direct carbon footprint of a sunflower. Mentioning that seems to enrage them more, because I'm making it even easier for the functional to escape the dysfunctional, and harder for the anxious to get around.
Sure, but Japan and Singapore having safe and clean public transportation isn’t entirely down to HBD giving them a better population to work with up front- part of running a dense civilization is that sufficiently noncomformist people get beaten by the police until they stop generating negative externalities by either being weird or antisocial. This makes progressives uncomfortable, because they have sympathy for the mentally ill underclass types that insist on being weird and antisocial in public spaces, unlike people who have to deal with them. So the USA spreads out to where whackadoodles can’t bother you that much.
Look, I know it sounds I’m saying the Twitter rightist creed ‘all of America is about spending money to escape niggers’ but it really isn’t. There are white hobos who camp out in public places in dense, affordable areas and make life uncomfortable for everyone too, and in a country like the US where just about every household can afford a car anyways it’s not actually spending money to escape them anyways- it’s spending distance. These aren’t Latin American elite style gated communities. People just want to be far away from places crammed together so much that someone being weird is being weird directly in your face.
Some Dutch acquaintances of mine who moved to Texas for laws friendlier to religious weirdos have noted that the distances in standard suburbs are too great to bike around, which is disappointing to them because of what they were used to. It’s not money that keeps out the riffraff; it’s distance. To solve the distance problem the riffraff would need to be constrained and American society is unwilling to do so.
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You don’t need to force ordinary people to deal with the depravity of the underclass, though. This is a political choice. American politicians choose to force public transport users to deal with the worst underclass scum America has to offer. It doesn’t have to be that way. These people can be locked up or killed, they don’t matter. It’s the biggest libshit argument of all to suggest that the scum being in public is “inevitable” and we all have to make peace with them.
It's not a political choice. It's an inevitable political consequence of the culture of the American PMC.
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This isn't even an ulterior motive for many people, who will come right out and argue that "a program only for the poor is a poor program".
This argument I find anywhere from compelling to enraging depending on context. It feels like the motte is "mass transit will be much better planned if nobody has incentive to zone it out of practicality" and the bailey is "if rich people's kids can't escape failing public schools either then they'll instead miraculously fix them somehow".
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So, I largely agree with your assessment that anti-car advocates do make evasive and disingenuous arguments for their position. I have certainly been guilty of this in the past. My real objection to cars is “driving makes me very anxious, and I would prefer to live around other people who feel similarly, and that way people wouldn’t think I’m a neurotic man-child because I’m not good at driving.” All of the other anti-car arguments, about carbon footprints and air pollution and fatality risks from car accidents, are tools I can deploy when trying to argue my case in front of people who do not share my visceral aversion to driving. They are not my actual reasons, but they do seem to be substantially more rhetorically successful than my actual reasons, which is why I have deployed them in the past.
This is presumably what is motivating so much of the extremely poor argumentation you’re noticing. However, I believe that a lot of the same cynicism and evasion is typical of most pro-car people as well. It all comes down to basic aesthetic personal preferences, to which people deploy various disingenuous but superficially-public-spirited practical arguments in order to lend the veneer of intellectual respectability.
Now, in terms of your accusation that many anti-car people want to force rich people to interact with poor people, that is probably an argument that is deployed by many anti-car commentators - and in fairness, there is probably a substantial overlap between anti-car people and socialists - but I do want to point out that at least in America we have a long and storied history of conservative/right-wing urbanism, typified by publications such as City Journal, and that the polarization that has caused conservatism to lurch in the direction of rural/suburban populism is very recent and could easily be reversed. For us right-wing urbanists, a massive crackdown on vagrancy and crime - this making transit more appealing to rich people by removing all the visibly poor/dysfunctional people - is a necessary precondition to the fulfillment of our vision.
And this is not just big-city Corpocons whose experience of public transport is taking the LIRR back from the Hamptons when they have an urgent meeting. The American Conservative is the house journal of Buchananite paleoconservativism, and has a New Urbanist blog, and used to have a (pro) public transport column. Peter Hitchens (the UK's most prominent paleoconservative, and brother of the late more US-famous Christopher) is also notoriously pro-train.
FWIW, I think this was always a non-starter with the masses. Urban=black=left-wing=bad seems pretty baked into the id of the older, stupider subset of conservative voters who are the core audience for right-populism.
And it is worth noticing that this is what the European and 1st-world Asian cities where public transport is used by normal people do. (You don't have to remove visibly poor people if everyone knows you have removed visibly dysfunctional people). The faction of the very online left who think that cities are good, but also oppose policing them, is insane. Cities have needed policing since Babylon. Cities have needed policing by a corps of full-time, professional police with powers of arrest since the Industrial Revolution created the urban working class.
Agreed. How ridiculous for American conservatives to cede all their great cities without a fight to live miserable atomized suburban lives. Reclaim the cities first, excise the scum, then you can make arguments about urbanism. There is no reason US cities must be the way they are.
American conservatives lost all the big cities in the Civil Rights struggle, and fled. Now those who won are trying make life outside the cities difficult in various ways. Why shouldn't they argue against that?
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Fair enough, and I applaud you for your honesty. As I said, I don't really care if you want to make your life and town different than mine. It bothers me when others want to change my lifestyle from far away because it gives them feelings.
If I want to live in a safe, convenient, family-oriented place in America at a middle-class price point, I am limited to car-centric places. I know this is path-dependent, and the experience of the Japanese is quite different.
That's entirely true, and East Asia is the perfect example of that. The functional, rich and poor alike, can enjoy public parks and clean, safe mass transit, because there are so few dysfunctional, and those few are rapidly removed from the public.
That requires pragmatic and authoritarian East Asian morality and culture though. That's not possible in the West, where the Blue Tribe hides behind the motte of helping the poor and functional, in order to farm the bailey of increasing the dysfunctional so they can thumb their nose at the Red Tribe.
It doesn't require East Asian morality and culture - even 2023 NYC subway levels of disorder on public transport, let alone 2023 BART or LA Metro levels, would be a five alarm fire in City Hall in any European city - even Naples. There is a good case that all it requires is fare enforcement - the number of people who are going to buy a ticket in order to shit up a tube train is not high.
"Blue Tribe" and "Red Tribe" are US-specific concepts - there are terminally online people in any European country who think they are part of the blue tribe, but not enough to build a serious political party around. And the specific problem of not being willing to enforce basic quality-of-life crimes on public transport stems from the way the tribal conflict interacts with a US-specific race relations issue. It clearly is possible to have non-shittified public transport in the West, because London, Paris, Berlin, Zurich, etc. do.
No it wouldn't. Because they just wouldn't talk about it. The politicians and press would conspire to keep silent about it.
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Seeing how El Salvador went from being a crime-ridden hellhole to being safer than almost anywhere in America in the span of a few years would seem to invalidate the notion that such measures are impossible. Maybe blue tribe liberals won't be the ones to do it, but their hold on power is not eternal, and they are doing their best to empower nonwhite immigrant groups that have fewer qualms about the methods necessary to clean the place up.
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Years ago I saw a beggar in China sitting on the sidewalk. Two Chinese cops stood over him and were politely trying to get him to stop. They weren't dragging him off or even talking harshly. But they were standing over him preventing him from begging.
If I had to spend a few weeks living and using public transportation in San Francisco or a major Chinese city, I would 100% choose the Chinese city. You are spot on about the lack of publicly dysfunctional people making big urban centers tolerable.
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Again, you’re looking at our current cultural/political moment and acting as though it’s indicative of some deep and timeless truth about “Western morality”, when in reality many aspects of it are entirely contingent and reversible. Less than a hundred years ago in America, people with mental and physical disabilities were routinely institutionalized, and even lobotomized and/or coercively sterilized. This was one of the great triumphs of the first half of the 20th century, and it is largely Christian conservatives who revolted against this and who still to this day crow about how progressives are evil eugenicists.
Deinstitutionalization in this country happened under Reagan, as a result of activism from both leftist disability-rights advocates and libertarian anti-government/pro-liberty types. Blame can be spread all around for the catastrophic proliferation of street homelessness and the coddling of the disabled. Yes, there was certainly a Marxist anti-civilization element involved - the Critical Disability Theorists, an offshoot of the Frankfurt School, for one - but they were far outnumbered by do-gooders from across the political spectrum who felt yucky and guilty over how successful their forebears had been at nearly eradicating profound mental illness and high levels of crime in this country.
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See, I'd love this, and I'd love making urban life safer and more beautiful. It's not really my cup of tea, but I would love to have it as an option.
But my opposition to the anti-car people comes from a political realism. I don't think the PMC culture that runs cities will ever crack down on dysfunction. Given that, I want to protect the rural/suburban car-based life that affords me separation from the crime and dysfunction of the city with everything I've got. Realistically, the options for Americans aren't "safe suburbs with car culture" vs. "safe cities with walking and public transit," they're "safe suburbs with car culture" vs. "unsafe cities with muggings where you walk and schizophrenic tweakers shouting on the train." When urbanists say my way of life needs to be destroyed and everyone should become a city-dweller -- without fixing the dysfunction of the cities -- I treat them like people carelessly, maybe even maliciously, trying to lead me into physical insecurity, and act accordingly.
I wish right-wing urbanists every bit of luck, and should it come to me to aid them in concrete ways I will do so. But I'm not going to hold my breath that America's cities become anything more than crime-infested, hollowed-out lands of despair, with the potential exception of Manhattan, which is probably America's only actual good urban neighborhood by international standards.
I feel exactly the same, by disposition I’m not inclined to be a car person. Hell, I’ve put my money where my mouth is and I commuted by bicycle for years while it was feasible.
I don’t have a neurotic aversion to driving but I don’t move it either and I’d much rather do almost anything else.
But your average urbanist is also the average person who cried, pissed and shit himself when fentanyl Floyd punched his ticket and is quick on the trigger to defend or excuse every lowlife degenerate who makes urban life functionally impossible for families with young children and no trust fund to thrive.
So, rolling coal it is.
Until the public transit people and the law and order people get together I’m basically obligated to be like “fuck you I’ve got mine.”
So it goes.
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I've experienced kind of a similar thing on a completely different subject.
One of my other interests is firearms and self-defense. On every controversial shooting incident where somebody gets killed, somebody always chimes in with something to the effect of, they should have shot them in the leg instead. I've used to respond with the conventional gun culture version of the argument against that, which is that it's wrong to think of a firearm as a non-lethal weapon, if you're ever justified at shooting at somebody you should be shooting center mass to stop the threat, and also that virtually nobody is accurate enough in an actual life-threatening situation to reliably hit somebody's leg. These arguments mostly don't seem to have much effect on people though. I started trying another argument, which is that leg shots are not at all less lethal - the thigh has some of the biggest arteries in the body, feeding the biggest muscles in the body and attached to the thickest bones in the body, and sending bullets into that is likely to cause severe enough bleeding to lead to death in minutes, if not life-changing injuries that they will never fully recover from. That argument seems to be much more effective at convincing people that attempting to shoot people who are a deadly danger in the leg or other extremity is not a good idea.
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Universal suffrage makes this impossible, the average and substandard are natural allies against the great. If truly awesome people wish to not see the worst bodies of their generation, the latter will convince the middle that the slope is slippery. That after the bottom percent, the second lowest will be restricted. And so on until only the top percent is allowed to enjoy transport funded by taxes they pay.
The middle will buy it as oppressing those below, so natural throughout time and space, is considered immoral while sticking it to those above is considered rightful.
Confucius cries.
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I find a lot of the pro/anti car arguments get bogged down in the fact that there aren’t many Americans who have lived in Europe and vice versa, for example practical confusions about how stock resupply works on pedestrianised streets or why Americans actually want to be somewhat isolated from the dangerous inner cities (I’ve seen this problem with Irish anti-car advocates too when they oppose pro-car compromises that are normal in very walkable European cities).
Personally I find these conversations very interesting, but you can’t really get anywhere when a good chunk of either side of the debate hasn’t experienced the alternative.
Right, like obviously you just allow vehicles between 1am and 6am, easy.
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