They used to be. And then people decided carriages were more convenient than walking. And then people decided cars were more convenient than carriages.
People didn’t really decide, an upper class was able to afford automobiles, they hit tons of people in the streets, they worked together with politicians and automakers to push to make streets for the cars for safety, and invented the term jaywalking. The people who owned cars decided streets belonged to them and through mass production and suburban development, they have become completely normalized.
This legitimately makes it safer for them to coexist, this isn’t some bad thing the lawmakers did just because they had cars. Whether or not you agree with still having cars doesn’t change that that was a good thing.
At the time, many places were considering outright banning cars or at least requiring speed limiters in all cars (to limit to like 25 mph). Car companies knew this would hurt sales, so they started a PR campaign to victim blame pedestrians for pedestrian fatalities. I personally think universal speed limiters set to a quite low speed along with far fewer cars would be far better for safety than modern “rules of the road” + car domination.
The turning point came in 1923, says Norton, when 42,000 Cincinnati residents signed a petition for a ballot initiative that would require all cars to have a governor limiting them to 25 miles per hour. Local auto dealers were terrified, and sprang into action, sending letters to every car owner in the city and taking out advertisements against the measure.
…
Even while passing these laws, however, auto industry groups faced a problem: In Kansas City and elsewhere, no one had followed the rules, and they were rarely enforced by police or judges. To solve it, the industry took up several strategies.
One was an attempt to shape news coverage of car accidents. The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, an industry group, established a free wire service for newspapers: Reporters could send in the basic details of a traffic accident and would get in return a complete article to print the next day. These articles, printed widely, shifted the blame for accidents to pedestrians — signaling that following these new laws was important.
Similarly, AAA began sponsoring school safety campaigns and poster contests, crafted around the importance of staying out of the street. Some of the campaigns also ridiculed kids who didn’t follow the rules — in 1925, for instance, hundreds of Detroit school children watched the “trial” of a 12-year-old who’d crossed a street unsafely, and, as Norton writes, a jury of his peers sentenced him to clean chalkboards for a week.
This was also part of the final strategy: shame. In getting pedestrians to follow traffic laws, “the ridicule of their fellow citizens is far more effective than any other means which might be adopted,” said E.B. Lefferts, the head of the Automobile Club of Southern California in the 1920s. Norton likens the resulting campaign to the anti-drug messaging of the '80s and '90s, in which drug use was portrayed as not only dangerous but stupid.
Auto campaigners lobbied police to publicly shame transgressors by whistling or shouting at them — and even carrying women back to the sidewalk — instead of quietly reprimanding or fining them. They staged safety campaigns in which actors dressed in 19th-century garb, or as clowns, were hired to cross the street illegally, signifying that the practice was outdated and foolish. In a 1924 New York safety campaign, a clown was marched in front of a slow-moving Model T and rammed repeatedly.
This strategy also explains the name that was given to crossing illegally on foot: jaywalking. During this era, the word “jay” meant something like “rube” or “hick” — a person from the sticks, who didn’t know how to behave in a city. So pro-auto groups promoted use of the word “jay walker” as someone who didn’t know how to walk in a city, threatening public safety.
North american street and road design are not great at preventing automobile accidents due to their wide designs, high speed limits, and poor road hierarchy uses. The roads are especially unsafe for anyone outside of a car like pedestrians and cyclists. If this was truly done for safety there would be more traffic calming, safer pedestrian crossing and protected bike lanes. Cars are the most subsidized method of transit in North America and the roads/streets are designed to move as many cars as fast as possible.
Lawmakers also sat idly by while big auto corporations bought street car companies, ripped out the street cars, replaced them with buses, and eventually cancelled the bus services as they were now stuck in the traffic created by destroying the street cars and promoting more people to drive. Lawmakers also decided that dense downtown areas should be destroying their buildings to meet parking minimums that were based on very little real data. Sure lawmakers didn’t force you to buy a car, but they certainly contributed to the erosion of walkability and transit as well as promoted car centric design (suburbs, strip malls, parking minimums).
And then people demanded lots of paved raceways for their cars, which filled up, and made things dangerous for everybody, and worthwhile places far apart, and most of the drivers angry and miserable. Now, the world is on fire, mental health and social cohesion has gone to shit, and all those paved raceways are falling apart because nobody can afford to fix them.
But, yeah, the first part of that story is cute.
Aye, it does sound that way until you start digging into it. The traffic congestion, the road rage, and the rising rate of traffic fatalities are just obvious.
Think about it more, and work-from-home is still a big fight after the pandemic because people hate commuting. It’s pretty obvious when looking around out on the road; driving does not make drivers happy on the whole. The world is literally on fire; we had weeks of air-quality alerts around here because of record-breaking Canadian wildfires. Driving everywhere cuts off interactions with other people, the “weak ties” in a community that we now know are essential to countering the loneliness epidemic. In fact, the opioid epidemic is related, because opioids simulate the same brain receptors as social connectedness. And, of course, American infrastructure consistently gets failing grades because we don’t maintain it. We would, but state and municipal budgets are straining under the burden.
I’m short, there’s tons of justification to “fuck cars”, if you look. There’s lots more than what I’ve mentioned here.
I wonder, were population centers large enough to be considered “busy” before domesticated horses and carriages were around?
At the peak of the Roman empire, the city of Rome had at least one million inhabitants, a total not equaled again in Europe until the 19th century.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empire
At the peak of the Roman empire, the city of Rome had at least one million inhabitants, a total not equaled again in Europe until the 19th century.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empire
That number is usually considered to be way too high fwiw. At 1,000,000, it would have a population density of over 72,000 per square kilometer. Manila is the densest city in the world today at about 43,000 per square kilometer.
It’s even less likely when you consider they didn’t have any sort of high rises and a third of the city was dedicated to parks and public buildings.
Fuck cobblestone.
This comment was written by the bicycle gang.
It also sucks for those of us with bad ankles and knees. Almost as bad as sand. All I see on those pictures is pain.
I’m wondering if they feel as horrible on a fully suspended bike. I’m also commenting something just because.
There are workarounds to get cobblestone streets to work. In Groningen, Netherlands, I’ve seen cozy cobblestone streets which had a 50cm (1½ feet?) wide and very even brick strip in the center for bicycles. Looks and works great and it is an easy retrofit for historic cobblestone.
So, is the community against all cars? Or just the ones for cities? I went to LA last month to see my brother and we went to this nice area that had blocked the street off permanently and all the restaurants and businesses had taken over the road. I. Fucking. Loved. It. All the extra space was great. So in city life, I completely get it.
That being said… I am a car person. I have an MR2 turbo I love to death. I have a lifted F250 (I grew up on a farm in a small shithole town in SC. I know I’m considered bad here but eh, the Kia Sorento isn’t going to pull the dump trailer or the tractor and the lift is because I’m 8 at heart and still smile driving it around) and a heavily modified Jeep Cherokee I play off-road with. Plus my daily Honda Civic. Cars have souls and driving is a sense of freedom I am addicted to. I can promise you 100% of “grown ups” (age is subjective here) with loud cars isn’t to impress anyone else, it’s for us. I won’t even drive my MR2 at certain times to make sure I don’t disturb anyone and when I’m around a populated area, I shift at low RPM and keep the noise down a lot, but away from everyone in bum fuck rural America, that exhaust note is all for me.
I get you hate cars, I even agree for the most part. But does that mean ALL cars? Am I bad here?
Personal vehicles have a place, and a lot of people really enjoy the hobby of it. But at least what I’m against is how they’ve completely and utterly, fully enveloped our modern Life, paving over the places we have to live in the process. The auto industry has made people addicted to the concept that every place has to be accessable and beholdent to the automobile, making it inaccessible and very unpleasant for anyone who doesn’t buy into that system (pedestrians, disabled people, cyclists etc). It’s honestly a violation of personal freedom that many people can not perform their day-to-day basic functions of socializing, gathering food and working without paying into the micro transactional hell that of the Auto/Oil industry.
Being able to go somewhere and visit worry people without dribble feeding that piggy industry with my hard earned money into gas/electricity is freeing and should be the default. If someone wants to blast down a country road listening to the purr of the engine, power to them. Forcing everyone through deliberately exclusionary infrastructural planning to pilot a few Tons of metal plastic and combustion engines just to perform basic tasks? Fuck off.
(Edit: my bad language is not directed at you, but at the industry, you sound chill)
Nah man, I completely get it. Like I said above, I live in a rural shithole in SC and transportation is like 1/4rd or more of a lot of people’s income. Its easy to say “JuSt bUy SoMeThInG oLdER, yOU DoNt NeEd AnyTHiNg NiCe” but Im a technician at heart and full understand the depth of knowledge you need to properly maintain and repair an old car. If you are super duper lucky, you’ll have an uncle or brother to help you but most people are at the mercy of the shops around them and I personally have been F’d in the A because of ignorance or compliance and I know in some rather silly and not on purpose detail how a vehicle works. Public transportation doesn’t seem to be a possibility in our neck of the woods but doesn’t mean being a slave to car manufacturers is the only solution. I love the freedom, I even drive for a living now and still love it, but I’m not foolish enough to think I am not the outlier.
Biggest thing this community is against is car dependency. Cities should not be designed around cars as default, to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. It actually benefits car people, as I’m pretty sure you don’t want people like me – someone who sucks at and hates driving – clogging up the roads.
There’s this observation – the Downs-Thomson Paradox – that notes that the main thing reduces average traffic is not building more car infrastructure; it’s making better and faster alternatives to cars. When things are built more densely and walkable, when public transit is fast and convenient, you see traffic drop precipitously, as most people just want the fastest, most convenient option for getting places.
That said, I think most in this community don’t really like cars clogging up city streets, due to the simple fact that they are loud, dangerous, and polluting. My ideal city would have park-and-ride at the city limits, then electric microcars (more like glorified golf carts) in the city for those use cases that still need cars, like first responders, physically handicapped people who can’t walk/bike, etc. Rural areas would obviously still need cars, but even they could probably benefit from having better transit access.
Personally, I and most people in this community don’t view you as the enemy so long as you’re not an asshole driver. We view the systemic disinvestment in public transit and car-centric urban design as the primary enemies. After all, how can one blame someone who is just trying to live their life in a broken system? Hate the game, not the player!
I think the goal is more to break car dependance, and end up in a similar state to places like Amsterdam. In Amsterdam people still have cars, and there’s still a healthy car culture in the Netherlands . You just aren’t required to have a car to live.
My opinion:
Trucks used pragmatically for farming or legit hauling stuff is perfectly fine.
Cars used in true rural areas are also fine, because by definition, they haven’t been developed yet, so there’s pretty much no other way to get there.
But in populated areas (not just “cities” but also suburbs and other areas that are not truly rural and extremely spread out), spaces should be designed for walkability, and have good mass transit options. If a neighborhood is being built, put a small grocery store right next to it, so all those people can get groceries without driving. And put a bus stop near it, so they can get to other areas of town they actually need to go.
Cars aren’t going away entirely. They serve a specific purpose. But they’re overused.
The way I see it is that I love cars and driving but hate car dependency. People who don’t like that shouldn’t be forced to get a car. This leads to less bad drivers due to people merely putting up with driving rather than focusing on it, meaning a safer world for pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists, and other drivers.
Me using my 1200 kg econobox to reach destinations that public transport doesn’t give a hoot about is doing absolutely nothing to the planet compared to a rich person’s private jet, or cobalt mining, or manufacturing and shipping all the cheap plastic stuff people buy that they don’t even need from China etc.
I am all for walkable cities, I love my hometown where walking and cycling is not only possible, but infinitely better than driving. Yet I can coexist with cars in the same spaces. But I have so far seen absolutely zero viable arguments against car ownership. It’s a part of our personal freedoms that’s just more lucrative to take away than to fix the systematic problems of the world.
The main issue here? I’m not willing to give up my freedoms, and the rich fucks running this shitshow have no incentive to lower their profits.
This community’s counterpart on reddit started out great, but it quickly transformed into an extremist echo chamber of idealists that are painfully out of touch with the real world.
Am I an environmentalist? You are damn right. I grew up on a farm and in nature. It’s amazing and must be protected at all costs. But, do I think I personally contribute anything worth noting to that? No. If corporations and the ultra wealthy got their shit together, everyone in America could be rolling coal in their diesel pick ups and it wouldn’t matter. THAT DOES NOT MEAN WE SHOULD DO THAT, but I will not feel guilty for contributing a drop to a flood done by the top 0.1%. Me personally, I think the whole carbon footprint thing is great, but it’s pushed on the masses to try and be like “you guys better drive clean cars and recycle!” as their crude oil burning cargo ships and mass growth and slaughter of our fellow creatures on this planet do most of the damage. Everyone should be held accountable, but at what point is someone like me sacrificing something that gives us a little joy in our miserable little lives for at best, at absolutely best a wishful thought? My MR2 and Truck and Jeep make me happy, I won’t feel guilty for enjoying them.
You should separate “I am bad” from “what I do is bad”. I can give reasons why I believe driving around a car because it is fun is a bad thing to do. That doesn’t mean I think or want you to believe that you are bad.
Personally I believe “all” cars are bad. In emergency situations they have value, but ultimately I think it would be better if for personal and public transportation there were no cars at all.
People make fun of the “new towns” planned and built by post-war socialist governments in the UK, but I spent some delivering leaflets in Stevenage recently and it’s honestly heaven for pedestrians.
There are roads for cars, but they all connect to the back of homes. The front of each house leads into a wide pedestrian / cycle path, and the paths connect via tunnels underneath the roads. I would walk hours each day delivering leaflets and never see a car.
I think these are used to called “streets”, now roads are streets…
![[meme] Pedestrians shouldn't be relegated to the sidelines(lemmy.world)](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6b416d86-6a93-45bc-9275-c7c1d7a52943.webp){kind=link}