Post

It is really fucked up that we made driving the main mode of transportation in 90% of the country as an actual political choice when there are large populations of people everywhere who can’t or shouldn’t drive

I was reading a newspaper from Butte Montana 1900 and the train schedules were posted. You could get to any large city in the USA by train from there. Not now.

Ok, this is kind of nutty, but: the mountain west has the highest rate of gun suicide in the country by far, and rail has basically died as a transit option…is the increasing isolation of those states mixed with easy gun access creating the conditions for a suicide epidemic?

Ranching is hard, solitary work. Oil fields are deadly for workers. Not much social life and people are spread out. You have to like solitude or deliberate about being alone to live there.

That’s true, but when we were connected by rail, it was possible to get regular infusion of new information, people, and opportunities without having to do much other than come into town. Now? No one ends up there without intending to. No more passing through.

That’s true of many cities or towns that the railroads left behind.

I’m just mapping out the legitimately terrifying rise in suicides and the proportion in the mountain west to the isolation of car dependency, multiplied by the natural isolation of the landscape and water resources.

I will add passenger air flight to the list of possible contributors. Most of the US is "flyover country" compared to a national rail system.

—Jack Nicholson creepy nodding yes gif—

It's definitely a factor, for sure, and probably feeds a lot of the other factors. I'm not sure if you'd see nearly as much of the opioid and meth epidemics if there wasn't this... despair of inescapability to these kinds of places, for instance.

It isn't JUST cars and the death of rail travel, though. There's a while bunch of different ways that society has chosen to make our lives much not isolated.

Yes.

And it for sure contributes to DWIs. Years ago I used to go to this rural bar that was so remote it wasn't even on the electrical grid. I don't want to know how many patrons must have crashed their cars on the way home.

Every time I see a drunk driving or intoxicated driving psa, I think to myself that the cars are the problem more than the behavior. If driving is the only way to get between points, then people are going to drive even when they shouldn’t.

same thing with elderly people and 16 year olds. both should probably not be driving, but so much of our national psyche is dedicated to sprawling dedicated single-family home subdivisions being the ideal community for everyone

There's something deeply wrong about planning rules that include minimum parking requirements for bars

This part.

It makes my blood boil. Especially when you see the old train car and cable car networks EVERY major US city used to have. LA even used to have the largest train car network in the WORLD at one point. And then we tore it all up, in the name of the automobile.

Oh and ofcourse all the neighborhoods they destroyed to make room for giant ugly freeways and highways just HAPPENED to be POC neighborhoods.

I also think about how much land mass is taken up by garages, driveways, parking structures; land that could house people, or feed people, or be urban natural habitat.

And also objectively aesthetically displeasing, especially with parking lots. During the the development of city development game SimCity , the creators almost completely opted out of having parking lots in their game, because of how boring it would be. humantransit.org/2013/05/how-...

how sim city greenwashes parking — Human Transithumantransit.org Here's a shot of an edge city from the new SimCity. Notice what's missing? (Source: BLDGBLOG) From Geoff Manaugh's interview of the new SimCity's designer, Stone Librande: Geoff Manaugh: While you w...

Interesting. Did you ever see the 1960s animated mockumentary, "What On Earth!" about Martians observing earthling culture? They think automobiles are the planet's dominant species (and humans are parasites that infest earthlings). en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_on...

What on Earth! (film) - Wikipediaen.m.wikipedia.org

YESSS 💯💯👏👏👏 Our current setup is unsustainable.

And now LA is paying billions to put it back in, often along the same routes it once ran. Imagine if it just never went away. Fuck gm

I've been to 'third world' countries with better public transportation than the US.

I wonder how many countries anywhere have worse public transport than the USA.

Honestly I’d call every country that uses overland electricity in cities, doesn’t have maternity leave and universal healthcare developing. Only a country with high rates of poverty can have a homeless crisis. Political instability: Trump. And life expectancy isn’t particularly high either. 🤷‍♀️

I thought about this the other day when I was irritated by a slow senior driver. My self-righteousness; to say they shouldn’t drive, even if said in irritation, when what the hell else can they do?

Our ancestors made a lot of poor decisions, the consequences of which are still haunting us today. And then you have a lot of still (barely) living people clinging desperately to power, preventing us from fixing any of those mistakes.

Anna Zivarts just wrote a whole book about this exact thing islandpress.org/books/when-d...

When Driving Is Not an Optionislandpress.org

Her premise is that, counting children, seniors, and people with disabilities, 30% of the American population can't drive. Thirty percent! It's a really good book. @nondriver.bsky.social

Many more shouldn't be driving, but can't get away with not doing so.

It's a huge systemic problem.

Co-sign the above! Anna Zivarts @nondriver.bsky.social was also recently a guest on @thewaroncars.bsky.social podcast if you prefer to listen.

NEW EPISODE! We talk with activist Anna Letitia Zivarts about her book, "When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency" which addresses the needs of the one third of people in the U.S. who can not drive and argues for a system that works for all. thewaroncars.org/2024/05/07/1...

Hey hey hey, let's not forget that, while promoting driving, we ALSO made public transit purposefully expensive and unusable (I'm looking at you, $200 train from Boston to New York, and, behind you, the ol' 14-hour CLE to Philly Amtrak).

Not to mention that we used to have tracks for public transportation everywhere in this country. We took a lot of the down

Thanks, car manufacturers and their lobbyists. Oh, and Judge Doom.

Think of the least responsible, clumsiest, dimmest bulb you know and ensure they have no choice but to pilot a missile at high speed multiple times a day

This was the promise made to the car manufacturers in trade for their retooling for World War II.

I grew up in Hemet CA, when it was still mostly a retirement community, I fully agree, a lot of those older folks shouldn't have been driving at all, public transport wasnt great put there either and didn't run on the weekends.

The automotive transportation lobby is a valuable source of income for politicians.

Started 68 years ago. President Dwight D. Eisenhower with the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.

I think that's optimistic; it's basically everywhere outside of NYC. It's possible to be an adult relying on transit in SF or Chicago, but it still makes you a weirdo.

also, if we reduce the stranglehold of the car on our country, thus making states are less beholden to federal highway funding, states could start to lower their drinking age back to 18

?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationa...

National Minimum Drinking Age Act - Wikipediaen.m.wikipedia.org

No, I know that. I just don't know how you got there. Could you explain?

reminds me of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taken_f...

Taken for a Ride - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

💯