Bread and CircusesIs this too much to ask? Evidently it is. 😕
#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis
#ClimateAction #WarOnCars #BanCars
Hughster@breadandcircuses Not everyone lives in a city. All those millions of people in towns and villages will always need private transport of some kind, unless one would rather try to forcibly depopulate the countryside like some modern-day version of the Highland Clearances.
Chris Blake@hughster
In less wealthy countries - say, much of Central America - there are indeed millions of people who live in rural villages, and very few of them own private cars. They live in those places because they're engaged in land-based subsistence activities and produce most of what they need locally. They often have a bus that periodically takes people to the nearest city, and usually bulkier supplies that are needed from a city are delivered occasionally by a cargo vehicle.
@breadandcircuses
In less wealthy countries - say, much of Central America - there are indeed millions of people who live in rural villages, and very few of them own private cars. They live in those places because they're engaged in land-based subsistence activities and produce most of what they need locally. They often have a bus that periodically takes people to the nearest city, and usually bulkier supplies that are needed from a city are delivered occasionally by a cargo vehicle.
@breadandcircuses
@chrisblake @breadandcircuses Yes, I forgot to say, that's the other option: we forcibly drive the rural population back into the pre-industrial age, where the people are mostly subsistence farmers and extremely poor, have few prospects of decent education or success compared to those in cities, and many never leave the place they were born. That's why most Central American countries are not considered developed. Is that really your vision of the future?
@hughster Wow, there's a lot to unpack here. I don't understand in what sense communities that have routine access to things like buses, heavy goods vehicles, usually radios and TVs, often some computers, and increasingly even shared internet access are "pre-industrial". If people have regular opportunities to travel to large cities by bus or other public transportation, then it's obviously not the case that they would never have the option to leave the towns they grew up in. @breadandcircuses
I've personally known people who grew up in small Central American or South Asian villages, went to university, worked in a city or even overseas for some years before moving back home, speak 3 or more languages, and are some of the most worldly, broad-minded, and well-educated people I've ever met. All without ever owning or regularly driving a car.
Obviously there are many rural places where people don't have cars and also happen to be living in grinding poverty, but that's not what I was talking about. There are plenty of people in the world who lead rural lives without cars while also enjoying all the things they need and then some, because their societies are set up to facilitate that. They provide examples of how that's possible, which we in the "first world" should be trying a lot harder to learn from.
You're basically presenting a false dilemma in which the only options compatible with non-urban living are a high-impact car culture vs. abject poverty with almost no modern technology at all. There's a lot of space available in between those extremes. It all just seems unthinkably exotic to many of us in the "first world" because our societies for the most part no longer *allow* us any of those other options.
@chrisblake Yes, in any poor communities there'll be unrepresentative exceptions, a minority lucky enough to escape their circumstances and do well despite the odds. That isn't an argument in favour of the environment.
Which central American and south Asian countries are we talking about specifically?
@hughster The people I mainly had in mind are from Belize and Nepal. Note, though, that I never said the people I was referring to grew up in and had to "escape" poverty; that was an assumption you made. I just said they grew up in villages and didn't have cars. The former came from a family that would probably be considered middle-income by her home country's standards and apparently had a reasonably comfortable upbringing there, but was not affluent by "first world" standards.
But that just illustrates my point, which I think you're still missing. In many parts of the world, even rural people who are reasonably well off economically typically don't own cars because regardless of where they live, it's unusual that private car ownership actually makes more economic sense than using things like buses. It's just hard for us to see that because our governments use very heavy subsidies to aggressively distort the market in favor of private cars.
In other words, if my villager friend had tried to purchase, fuel, and maintain her own car, that likely would have driven her into poverty. Instead, using more convivial modes of transportation helped her to leverage what we would probably consider quite modest means to pursue experiences and opportunities she wanted.
I say you're missing my point because you still seem to be conflating poverty with rural non-car-ownership, and my point is that those are two different things. Obviously a very poor villager will not have their own car, but the converse doesn't follow; living in a rural community without one's own car doesn't intrinsically drive people into poverty. If anything, when there are more efficient shared alternatives in place it can often help keep them out of it.
I'll end by sharing that if anyone reading this is unfamiliar with these points and would like to learn more, a good place to start is Ivan Illich's short book "Energy and Equity", which presents some very interesting observations about the economics of different transportation modes. Illich was kind of a seminal (and pretty devastating) critic of conventional "human development" discourse along these lines, informed largely by his own experiences living in rural Central and South America.
CrazyMyra@chrisblake It's part of the First World "saviour" complex to believe that everyone in the Third World is living in poverty. There's millions who grow up and go to school in villages and small towns, further their education in larger towns or cities, and then return to their regions. Since they haven't transplanted to the First World and been "saved" by access to cutting-edge trends, they somehow don't exist.
LisPi@hughster @breadandcircuses Did you know that most of the old-time USA was built on the back of trains & rails?
Those thing were abandoned or torn up during the 20th century to make the automobile industry happy. They literally bought rail operations to shut them down.
@lispi314 It wasn't some auto industry conspiracy: cars became omnipresent and trains less used because cars were much more convenient and flexible than trains, serving every location in the country point to point. It happened in pretty much every economically developed country in the world, even though the US went further than most in reshaping development around it.
Trying to deny this is pointless and doesn't help us solve the problems of car dependency and traffic in cities and large towns.
RevJeber
Grandpa Don@jeber Railroads introduced TOFC/COFC in the '60s. I was directly involved in engineering systems and methods. The trucking lobby fought it. Until we started buying everything from China, transported via containers, the COFC concept was doa in America not because it was inferior but because politics, both local and national, fought it. We literally welded containers to truck chassis because nobody would use them.
When is the last time you saw a trailer on flatcar? Long haul trucks are stupid.
When is the last time you saw a trailer on flatcar? Long haul trucks are stupid.
@hughster
There absolutely was a combination of auto and gas industry behind the decommissioning of interurban railways and trolley systems in cities. Yes, autos presented big advantages & would have taken over a lot of personal transportation, but killing the rail systems sealed the deal. Case in point: the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin railroad went out of business when its track into Chicago that fed directly to the Loop elevated system was eliminated by the building of the Eisenhower expressway.
There absolutely was a combination of auto and gas industry behind the decommissioning of interurban railways and trolley systems in cities. Yes, autos presented big advantages & would have taken over a lot of personal transportation, but killing the rail systems sealed the deal. Case in point: the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin railroad went out of business when its track into Chicago that fed directly to the Loop elevated system was eliminated by the building of the Eisenhower expressway.
@dbc3 Sure, but I think we're talking about US-specific circumstances here, though, rather than the overall reason cars took over across the world. Other countries with well-developed rail networks didn't experience this, particularly in Europe. The UK had incredible rail coverage until the 60s, when it closed a great amount of the network because people had simply been shifting to road transport en masse over the previous few decades—both for freight and passenger services.
@hughster
@lispi314
@breadandcircuses
You may be talking world-wide.
I was responding to the OP:
"Did you know that most of the old-time USA was built on the back of trains & rails?"
Had intelligent long-range planning been used rather that corporate greed, the interstate highway system would have incorporated high speed rail as a basic design requirement for the major coast to coast routes like I-80, I-70 & north-south like I-95, I-5
Sharon Gibson Morgan@hughster @lispi314 The construction of the Interstate Highway System, begun in 1956, also contributed to the convenience of the automobile over train travel. It definitely cut down on travel time to get from point A to point B. For instance, the time it takes to get from Milwaukee to Chicago is about 90-minute drive from I-94 E to the Loop. The scenic route takes 3 hours, 12 minutes.
@SharonGibson3 @hughster An investment of course that would have had overall much better returns if instead it had been made out of railways.
And that they were operated by the state rather than purely by profit-based organizations, as that has also predictably led to disaster almost everywhere it has been tried. With Japan as a notable exception that got around that through strict & active regulation.
@hughster It was pretty obvious to anyone who bothered to run the numbers or even just *look* at the time that this was going to be the eventual outcome.
Overlooking that was directly influenced by propaganda such as the one analyzed in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n94-_yE4IeU
If you pay close attention, you'll note that even the propaganda piece's narrator (not just the video content) mentions some of the problems that will cause and makes exactly no suggestion for how to fix it.
Would You Fall for It? [ST08]
@lispi314 I've seen this already. This too is US-centric and only explains how the US became markedly more car-centric and blighted its cities so much more significantly than other developed nations; it doesn't account for why cars were universally popular throughout all developed nations in the first place where none of this propaganda was seen. And the simple reason for that is that cars were generally a positive thing for people and everybody wanted one.
@hughster I think "follow the leader" accounted for a *lot* of it (also, fancy expensive luxury you can put on display, I don't get it but idiots sure love their luxury social displays). It certainly explains a large part of why Canada also ruined itself doing the same.
"The Americans" are doing it and rich so it must work right? No, they're idiots and we'll fall with them if we follow them into their idiocy. Nevertheless the pattern keeps repeating.
@lispi314 It really didn't. Cars were developed and manufactured across multiple countries from the late 19th century onwards completely independently from each other. Innovations in modern road infrastructure too were pioneered by different countries, e.g. traffic lights in the UK and freeways in Italy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile
@lispi314 If you follow Not Just Bikes' videos on roads in the Netherlands and other European countries, you'll see that the road styles and urban development patterns are markedly different from North America here despite there being a heck of a lot of cars and roads. Your experience of cars and urban development around them is pretty markedly unique to you.