His thesis is obviously wrong because you can wear hats in cars, but it’s also wrong because people are more likely to wear hats in car-dependent areas. Hat-wearing, with the exception of protection from winter weather, is a fashion choice, not at all related to transportation. I guarantee you that more people are wearing hats in Ft. Worth or Nashville than in NYC.
It would stand to reason that hats would be more popular in places like Southeast Asia. Why aren't more Japanese people wearing hats, then?
The environment being bred in such american cities is just simply not fit for a normal human, and the societal factors that shape such people can also be attributed to a lot of forms of terror attacks done against large groups like mass shootings,etc.
The brain-dead argument is to suggest that "car-oriented development caused this" but that doesn't even make any sense as many of the suburbs in the 1970s/1980s/1990s were some of the safest places around.
There's also the issues of LatAm/African/Indian cities, which are objectively shittier than American cities in every single way, and while we don't hear of specific incidents their crime rate is much higher. In the
list of cities with the highest murder rate, Mexico has eleven of the top 25 (Brazil has four, United States has four, Ecuador, Haiti, and South Africa have a few too). On that note, I have to assume Mexico is civilized enough to record these things, and recording things makes a big difference. In shitholes like San Francisco, unreported crime (or crime that is de facto legal, like petty theft) that has made California defenders can point to the fudged numbers because in their mind "no reported crime = no crime occurred" (note that this isn't consistent, they'll talk about how low city crime is but also cry about "unreported rape").
This why when crime is discussed people get into long discussions about the relations of crime being rape, poverty, and environment.
Urbanist gets enraged that people care about public safety on transit.
It's shit like "there's no such thing as 'accidents' when driving" is what REALLY turns off people of all political leanings. My brother is a liberal and sympathizes with some of the more pro-urbanist policies but only a deranged person would equate "An inattentive driver took a turn too fast and hit my fiancee's father when he was out bicycling" as "attempted murder".
