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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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