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Notes -
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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