Comment by acdha
1 month ago
> Individuals frequently can chose to not use a car, of course
To some extent, yes, but my point was that it’s not realistic for many people because we treat walkable neighborhoods like luxuries. If you wake up in your 40s with a bad back and cardio problems because you live in a suburb and drive everywhere, you can’t roll back the clock and build sidewalks, legalize density, or run decent transit and on average don’t have the money to move somewhere dramatically better.
I think a growing number of people, especially younger ones, realize this is unsustainable but it took generations to get here and it’ll take a while to change trajectories, too. If gas prices had stayed high in the seventies that might have gone differently but a huge percentage of American neighborhoods are designed to minimize physical activity and that’s often enforced by law.
That's what I meant by, it's not realistic for everyone and everywhere.
> I think a growing number of people, especially younger ones, realize this is unsustainable but it took generations to get here and it’ll take a while to change trajectories, too.
Urbanist movements, including walkable communities, are much older than this younger generation. I think within a certain segment - well-educated upper middle class, maybe - it's long had influence.
I think they need to bring those ideas to other segments of society, which they have a hard time doing.
I definitely don’t think that it’s new to the current young generation but I am optimistic that they might have enough political clout to actually make progress. My neighborhood narrowly avoided becoming a highway in the 60s so we have some older folks who have been fighting car culture since before I was born, but there were a lot of people who didn’t really care because it was more affordable in the past, but their kids are a lot more motivated because it’s so financially non-viable now.
In the United States, the other big factor was recognizing how much it wasn’t just car culture but racism driving things. Despite the current moment, I get the impression that a lot of people are more aware of how much avoiding sidewalks and transit was driven by racism and just hurt everyone.