Comment by PorciiVorbesc
15 hours ago
>You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise
So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait?
I dislike this type of patronizing superficial handweaving advice that is disconnected from the harsh challenges of building more great public transport infra (lack of funds, geography and land ownership issues, nimbyism, public safety concerns, labor/material shortages, government bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence etc).
People use cars because they have no better choice. I'd also want my city to build me Swiss levels of public transport so I wouldn't have to drive, but guess what, the infra sucks and the city is insolvent, so that leaves me with little choice for the next decades as 100% nothing will change for the better in this regard, so then car driving it is. I didn't make it this way, it's the way the city management has botched it over the last decades, but it's still on me now to adapt to it, and cars are one of the ways.
I agree with you in spirit, that everyone should have great public transport ideally, but when cities are broke and that infra doesn't exist, then that externality is burdened on the individuals because they have no other choice but still need to get to work and other places. Telling them they can "just build more infra" is like telling homeless person they can just buy a house. OK cool, but with what money?
> So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait?
No, the point was that instead of cities waiting until self-driving cars become an option to help get rid of terrible drivers, the cities could invest in public transportation today, and get better road safety that way.
Huge amounts of insolvency is due to supporting this failed urban planning experiment. Urban centers are significantly more economically productive and significantly less expensive. Carism leads people into this trap when they should be advocating for significant expansion of dense cities and transit.
This is just learned helplessness. The US already spends unfathomable amounts of money and resources on car infra, and there's always some nonsensical defense like "it's just impossible to do it any other way!", as if cars are simply a law of nature. That lack of money can be solved by diverting some of the money going into roads into instead improving public transport infra.
The solution should NOT be investing in driverless cars, which are all owned by megacorps and leave people shackled to Google and Elon Musk.
You even mentioned another cliche, Geography, but then right below mention Switzerland. Same goes for NIMBYism and everything else you mentioned, how come these aren't issues when building massive 12 lane highways, but adding some dedicated bike paths suddenly turns into a quagmire that rivals the Manhattan Project in scale and difficulty?
Utrecht in the Netherlands is a perfect example of reversing course on car-centric designs. They had a canal, emptied it out to build a massive highway, then realized "hey, that's idiotic!" And turned it back into a canal and banned cars from the area completely. It's now a gorgeous city center free of cars, plentiful public transport options, accessible to wheelchair users and kids and literally everyone.
Americans do not care about biklanes or modifying their cities in that way, they want driverless cars and more large multilane highways/roads so that's what we will get.
Americans don't like walking/biking and love cars.
It's not really learned helplessness it's just what the vast majority of our country wants.
Remember the majority voters voted someone in who specifically campaigned on getting out of any climate change agreements and to bring back coal mining.
The point is that society's priorities are messed up. Throwing your hands in the air and taking the path of least resistance is never going to lead to change.
The world is literally on fire but the average person simply doesn't give a shit because they don't want to be inconvenienced.