I’m going to disagree with this common “cars are evil and ruin cities” take that Reddit and YouTube lefties always seem to have. Having a car and being able to travel anywhere in minutes at anytime is almost a miracle (especially if you had to rely on spotty public transit for 15 years or walking/cycling in horrible weather, limiting how far you can travel for what services). Getting a car and being able to skip those problems has been amazing for me and I’m starting to think people who hate cars and cities catering to drivers are spoiled and don’t realize how good they have it. These same people are the ones voting and passing laws to make driving more hard and more expensive so that everyone else suffers (“people must suffer for doing something I hate!”). “Oh, just take the bus or cycle” they scream at you w/o realizing you have a job where you need to be on-call 24/7 (or any other context making public transit impossible).
Live in pod within walking distance to “Eat a Bug!” ration station and kill the car along with freedom of movement beyond walking (and walking will be deemed ableist soon enough). You will be happy.
Fuck that.
The only other human invention that has fundamentally changed so much day-to-day living has been the smart phone. We’ve already started changing our architecture and design to accommodate this. When the automobile became nearly universal in 20th Century America, we did that same thing.
In regards to making cities ugly, yes, this is true, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Perhaps the automobile puts a much-needed limit on population densities and these ugly cities are trying to surpass that limit (which is why they’re horrible)? This whole issue is much more nuanced and I’m sick of this “cars are evil” oversimplification.
*rant over*
