I’m sorry but this take is incredibly misguided. Cars are popular, plain and simple. The “community” has been vehemently demanding more cars ever since they were invented (even before if you include carriages).
Getting rid of cars is a matter of education and outreach to educate people on the costs and dangers of cars. But we shouldnt pretend like people haven’t loved cars for forever at this point.
The community input was added as a reaction to how the development was destroying our cities. You don’t see all the terrible projects that are stopped because of these procedures
We need a better way to greenlight and speedup good development without throwing away the things that make things like fossil fuel plants so hard to create
Cars were a replacement for horse and donkey carts. Each one was producing over 20 pounds of shit every day. Cities literally couldn’t grow any more due to the problem of shit removal in the early 1900s
Cars were seen as much cleaner and people were mostly for them, except for accidents that were more deadly than before. This contributed to the lack of stalls selling things in the streets now.
Unfortunately, I think the biggest argument for cars came mostly from Western countries and their quest for independence and individualism. Hindsight is 20/20 with this one, if people can’t see how detrimental cars have become it’s because they cling tightly to their “personal freedom” to drive wherever they want whenever they want.
That’s exactly the reason why cars take away freedom instead of granting it. In a place with car-centric infrastructure where cars are the only way to move around, not owning a car or not being able to drive is absolutelt detrimental. Conversely, a place with good public transport gives freedom to all people, even those who are disabled by accomodating for them as much as possible. There will still be some people who don’t have any other choice to get around than by car, but by diminishinf the amount of drivers on the road as much as possoble, their lives are made better as well.
Cars dependent people think they are free just because society has bent over backwards to provide them with the best roads possible and cheap gasoline that they can buy pretty much anywhere.
That would be very surprising to NYC which still has all of those. They had all of that at the time and it’s still didn’t stop the literal shitstorm.
The fact that you’re talking about transporting people indicates you don’t understand what the problem was. All these horse carts were transporting goods from factories and farms into cities. They were replaced by trucks.
Some were taxis and personal vehicles, but the average person in a city didn’t have a horse. Where are they going to keep it? So even with nobody owning a horse, the streets were literally caked with shit. Trucks solved that problem.
I didn’t mean they didn’t exist at all. I meant they aren’t popular everywhere. I’m not arguing that we simply went straight from horse and buggy to every person having cars and a few places had mass transit. Mass transit was everywhere. It was an option for most people. Yes, most goods did transition to being transported by 18 wheelers. I’m not arguing we had 18 wheelers and horse drawn carriages, but that we had them along street cars and trains meant to transport goods and people. Next time I’ll try to be more clear.
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