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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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I'm a car driver. I've lived in various states driving my car to work, etc. None of those describe my experiences with cars.

I once had a commute where sometimes the freeway would get really congested. That's certainly annoying.

A single digit number of times in my life I've gotten trapped on one of those streets that have no U turn at every light. Then you have to make some weird series of turns for seemingly no good reason.

My typical driving experience is positive. Very rarely it is some frustrating bullshit. Some anti-car people act like car drivers are suffering greatly. That's at least partially true in San Jose. And just wrong almost everywhere else almost all the time.

I'm a car driver. I've lived in various states driving my car to work, etc. None of those describe my experiences with cars.

I've had pretty much all of them, adjusted for geography (replace the bend at Squirrel Hill with the Conshohocken Curve on the Schyulkill Expressway, for instance) and obedience (a no-U-turn sign means "here's a practical place to take a U-turn if there's no cops around"). I've also spent hours standing around Penn Station New York with no trains running. Not hours total, hours on more than one occasion. I've spent time standing in the cold and rain at bus stops with no bus coming (or at least, not stopping). I've taken crazy circuitous routes (that were the shortest possible) turning an hour trip by car into a 3 hour saga (with 30 minutes still by car). I've taken long standing-room-only commutes by bus and train, some of them so packed so you could barely breathe.