Comment by bsza

Uses change and laws need to keep up. Lobby or not, jaywalking is a reasonable thing to be illegal because when cars became common enough, walkers in their way caused an overall loss for everyone. People also used to be allowed to walk on the train tracks freely when trains were slower and more obvious - did the train lobby invent the word "foamer"? Should we make rail corridors train-free? Computer hacking became illegal during my lifetime to shift liability for faulty software and incompetence from the operators to the users. Before that, it didn't really matter because nobody was using the internet for anything important. Friends used to hack each other for fun. Bitcoin used to be a wild west where people would openly steal from or fool each other for sport - I don't think people really saw it as money or property when you could just generate it with your computer.

For hopefully most people, it should be attributed to the "Wait, now I have such a freedom and power?".

Opposite to "before the invention of bicycle, people married within a radius in the order of the mile" (can't remember the exact stat right now).

Cars were quite desirable in Soviet Union, where industry was not allowed to advertise. You had to get into a queue to buy a car, the state was not interested to make them in a quantity to satisfy the demand.

Very few people actually _needed_ cars as soviets built adequate public transport system. But there are many situations where car can really help a lot. Perhaps that's more obvious in a society which has rather few cars.

E.g. back in Soviet days and around that only one member of my extended family had a car. The rest of the family were really happy about opportunities it provides. E.g. with a car you can buy fresh produce directly from farmers with just few hours of driving. Doing the same without a car is so much hassle and effort people just won't do it, and then you're confined to what's available in a local grocery story (which was usually much worse than direct-from-farmer option). Do you think it has something to do with "car industry"?

No its much more straightforward, but I get it - there is no warm fuzzy feeling of discovering yet another global evil conspiracy out there set to get all of us.

We are family of 4 with 2 small kids. Whenever we travel, its a series of backpacks, other bags, other stuff, and then some more. Heck, even if I travel alone its almost never just me - there are heaps of garbage to dispose, big shopping bags to bring back, big backpack with camping or climbing or skiing gear etc.

It would have been absolute, utter nightmare to do this over public transport. This comes from European who has generally very good public transport (given rural area) and world's best train network specifically (Switzerland). Yet roads are choke full of cars and every year there is more.

Public transport simply ain't cutting it for anything but the simplest use cases, ie just me and nothing or small backpack. Some routes I take would take 3-5x longer with public transport, or are just not possible at all. No industry massage required here, ever. Not everybody lives in some dense city and never leaves outside for evenings or weekends.

It’s privacy vs not. It doesn’t really need special lobbying

Subsidies played a huge role, including the eminent domain bulldozing of cities for free-at-use highways. If people had to pay upfront for those costs, the urban landscape would look much different (probably closer to Japanese cities, which do have massive suburbs, but centred around train stations).

Yet Japan does still have cars (and a car culture even), they're just not necessarily the default or dominant mode of transport.

My view on this is based on situation in Ukraine: Ukraine definitely didn't have any car lobby at least until 1990 as Soviet Union was heavily investing into public transportation and did not profit from car sales.

Still, general opinion on cars was that you should buy one if you can, even if you're not going to use it for commute.

I doubt there was any car lobby in independent Ukraine as national car makers were just bad, and foreign were competitors. But general opinion on cars got to a point where not having a car when you can afford it (and can learn to drive, etc.) is considered weird.

So I'm afraid car dominance is just what happens naturally in a capitalist environment, and countering it requires an effort - e.g. eco-conscious population, urban planning and public transport optimization, etc. And Netherlands is such a country, as far as I know, but it just doesn't happen by default.

Isn't Not Just Bikes some US expat/biking maximalist?

I'm not sure I'd take him as some neutral authority on the history of cars and driving in Europe.