Write about what's outside of The box, because hating car culture isn't merely about cars. Posts are mostly about the US, sometimes focused on parenting. Would like to write something longer one day.
74 followers 93 following 394 posts
view profile on Bluesky
One thing to keep in mind is that all those tired and frustrated drivers busy ordering food on their phones are picking up their kids at the end of the day, and 110 kids are injured in parking lots and driveways each week in America. www.ksat.com/news/local/2...
it kinda is homeschooling if you identify as a car owner more than as a caretaker
it seems to serve as a class signifier of ~"we believe in public education but we're not poor enough to resort to a *bus*"
Oh yeah absolutely. Which is part of the reason I asked. So much of our political coverage codes "rural" (and "working class") as white voters with agency, while treating poor Black people who live in cities as passive beneficiaries of those programs. It does lead to misunderstandings.
Genuinely, who do you mean by "they"? Many rural poor would benefit from the option to move to low cost urban housing. But I haven't seen much reporting about poor city dwellers voting against their interest, and in America there's bipartisan hostility at the city level to helping poor residents.
Our cities could be managed differently. This is a political choice. bsky.app/profile/poli...
Great #urbanism in Paris! New rail lines to connect the city center to historical suburbs plus investment in housing means a greater number of people can more fully participate in the life of the city. Mode shifting away from cars is great by itself and enables so much more.
@techconnectify.bsky.social fyi good article about successful urbanism expanding to the historical suburbs of Paris
Great piece Brian! Captures something I've been trying to articulate here recently. Urbanist ideas that don't prioritize people who are struggling in our cities can't work, because our cities can't work without them. #AddUrbanism+
It seems inconsistent to oppose congestion pricing, merely because of lack of viable transit, but to support fees specific to EVs. EVs don't solve all the problems of cars, cities should charge all of them. But fees specific to EVs seem like a way to perpetuate more of the greater harms of ICE.
Most rich Americans have seen it, hence the cliche about going on vacation to experience a walkable place. But they think of those "poor people" in America as an abstraction, of threatening people who haven't worked hard enough to own a home and a car. Worth seeing transit in person not on Fox news.
Trams and bikepaths are great upgrades from driving! Urbanism is also about housing and protecting our neighbors who don't have a place in our car dependent and anti-housing status quo. Mobility and housing are intertwined aspects of our place in cities, and in determining who has a place.
once at a meeting of ~donors for a civic group where everyone else drove, one elderly rich white person asked how there were so many people who don't bother to vote. The city is full of people who can't be confident about having a roof much less a car! Why would they care about your politics?
That's valid, but ime traveling across town and understanding how others live without driving is an even stronger motivation for urbanism. That means recognizing the indignities US cities impose on people who cannot drive. But even before that, it means recognizing people.
I agree with the gist yet also disagree strongly with how this is usually applied. Traveling to learn is great but Americans often travel to experience luxury, elsewhere. US citizens with resources could learn a lot by taking some buses to see what their system imposes on others across town.
When Republicans say the quiet part loud about the politics of cars: The political forces encouraging and subsidizing driving are both antagonistic towards cheaper, safer, and more accessible means of transportation, and also opposed to serious responses to the climate crisis.
If somebody genuinely commented "drivers would be better off paying the proposed gas tax and getting better roads and fewer traffic jams, these Republicans don't understand anything about transportation planning" they'd be laughed off of this site.
Even nominally pro transit wonks jumped down the throat of @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social for proposing to fund bus operations from other city funds rather than collecting fares. Yet when Republicans propose taking other funds for roads instead of raising gas taxes nobody is confused.
When Republicans say the quiet part loud about the politics of cars: The political forces encouraging and subsidizing driving are both antagonistic towards cheaper, safer, and more accessible means of transportation, and also opposed to serious responses to the climate crisis.
You might realize there's an abundance of new dimensions for helping people, without merely getting rid of the environmental and labor laws of the status quo. An advantage of "ban cars" as an aspiration is that it cuts through all the reasons any beneficial changes are impossible in our status quo.
Drivers hit and run after killing people all the time, with no compensation to their disproportionately marginalized victims, and a likelihood of reoffending. But online carbrains make every story of potential harm from surveillance of license plates go viral. aaafoundation.org/wp-content/u...
here’s a version where the POV is blacked out whenever the driver takes their eyes off the road
If anything I think that's too restrictive, we shouldn't wait until after a driver hits somebody to send a message, but this is the right track. I think victims should be able to sue any car manufacturer of an automobile that fails to detect phone use and alert the driver to drive instead.
That's very effective messaging, I wish everyone watched it. Thank you for sharing. I'll be passing it on.
and the political forces actually opposed to changes like traffic calming are largely also opposed to cameras and automated fines for speeding (or congestion). Both current parties are carbrained but there's a coherent constituency for changes, automated fines, and reducing mode share of driving.
ie red light and speed cameras are a huge win for bikers and pedestrians
yes and in the context of leftist complaints about law enforcement, there are valid concerns about abuse of relatively poor drivers. But online there's largely complete denial that drivers as a class are rich and favored by cops over other people. Automated fines are the progressive exception!
Yes that would be good!! Shame how few criticisms of cameras using progressive terminology start by demanding the government severely restrict car use. Maybe the massive harm of driving, especially on marginalized groups, is shrugged off because of who's actually harmed by enforcement?
Library fines are maybe suboptimal but it's not a privacy violation. License plate readers are used in undesirable ways sometimes but the viral articles ~never focus on narrow reform, because the target audience is dangerous drivers who want blanket permission to drive however they want.
Privacy for cars isn't on the table. All cars using public roads are required to register with their state of residence and display a license plate for identification. There's an entire licensing regime for driving a car, not a right.
They mostly just want to speed without penalty. The % of our vulnerable immigrant neighbors who are drivers, nevermind drivers who regularly go ten over, is much lower than the % of anti-camera posters who are drivers.
Yes, or in other words nearly everyone could bike across our existing road network, including most people unable to drive. But the violence of drivers is the barrier to accessibility.
Nice. That is so obviously good and yet so aspirational to even imagine here.
quotes around "neighborhoods" to emphasize how the story that's politically acceptable about neighborhoods favors the particular interests that align with continued segregation. "Neighborhood character" has been more of a euphemism than about maintaining property values since the 60s.
We have a century long crisis of residential segregation created by politicians, that's forcing us into atomized lonely car dependent lifestyles bsky.app/profile/poli...
and in rich "neighborhoods", politicians discourage renters and don't count the ones who live there when considering pro housing policies that would reduce rents in poor neighborhoods politicians don't count owners who would benefit, or pretend an equity gain would be bad because of property taxes.
You know what else reduces air pollution? Forcing cars to not exceed the speed limit.
"Following crashes between bikes and cars on roads where both are mixed in together, bikers are much more likely than drivers to support physically separated bike lanes" level of surprise in this poll
by the time you're thirty you should have eight friends who will cut out pretend airplane wings and ride around a field on bikes pretending to do aerial maneuvers
Residential segregation over large geographic areas, along race and class lines, is bad but not inherently lonely. But since the ~30s it was paired with zoning that required large lots and banned businesses where outsiders might work or shop. So neighbors mixed less than they would have in a condo.
@thewaroncars.bsky.social There's a story about cars and loneliness with causation in the other direction. Before Moses was tearing down NYC tenements to build highways, all cities were necessary heterogeneous. Large scale residential segregation created loneliness and a need for more cars.
One of the best things media could do for road safety is include motor vehicle fatalities among homicides, and generally include what happens on our public roads when covering public safety.
Yes and look at that person using a three wheel mobility device to move through a good busy public space in their city. In the US the cops would, idk, warn them to stop blocking traffic?
Genuinely hurts to see that done to the Richmond station, even more than most urban highways. A train station should place visitors straight into the city, surrounded by all of the things and people they came to see.
#bancars EVs aren't a panacea, but by and large the same political forces opposing less-harmful cars (dealership owners, the fossil fuel industry, Shawn Fain and maybe people can finally understand that) are the same political forces opposing a mode shift away from cars at all.
This seems to largely be a BYD story. Too bad there's a bipartisan consensus to stop Americans from buying Chinese automobiles, and especially unfortunate when it comes to cheaper and smaller EVs. "BYD recorded 13,503 new registrations in July, up 225% annually." www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/t...
to clarify, I'm not saying the right understands it. I don't really care. But it's true. There are good political commitments on the left, which are inconsistent with many widespread opinions about car insurance. That matters because Insurance is an important policy lever.
I don't have a pithy explanation for why the left has this blind spot for harms covered by car and home insurance. But the policy response to both is to replace these car dependent homes in the wilderness with housing in city centers.
For all the valid complaints about subsidized home insurance (e.g. Federal flood protection), that pales in comparison with the implicit subsidy drivers receive through lower premiums due to car liability insurance not covering much of the costs they impose.
Insuring your children driving is expensive because it's dangerous for children to operate deadly machinery, and we should avoid that. Insuring people who drive at night is expensive because driving at night is risky, and we should make sure workers exposed to that harm are compensated.
There's a similar sort of dynamic for car insurance, where people who consider themselves left don't both understanding the nature of harm being insured nevermind the calculations.
It's climate denialism now but this same type of reckless development and calls for subsidies for people building in wild fire zones was happening decades ago. Now the "left" is resorting to climate denialism to defend privately owned million dollar homes on what should be public wilderness.
it will be with the right candidates! Great campaigning. Huge win for residents if they get it.
Dystopian future implies that American parents aren't already letting children drive themselves.
it's so much worse than our general hostile architecture in public spaces for anybody not in a car. At many American bus stops sitting down also makes people more vulnerable to drivers crashing into the already bent over bus stop signs.
Beware carbrain activists and viral article writers talking up their concern with automotive privacy vs all other corporate and government surveillance.
Let's figure out how this could have happened. Was the building wearing a reflective garment? Did it wave a bright flag?
Yeah. I mostly hear about that in context of storage at home. Intersection of the two dangers, some (many?) states have no penalty for drivers leaving guns laying around in public www.wsmv.com/2025/02/05/p...
La Spata sounds like a real leader: "we talk about sidewalks and we talk about PROWAG accessibility standards in theory. And then when you are riding a bike alongside someone for whom an inch is a bump, as she calls it, you think differently about accessibility."
Clarification: even "one hand" underrates the danger of car culture. Today I was walking on a street without a sidewalk as an SUV driver passed me with both hands on the phone.
Drivers regularly stare at their phones on public roads. I doubt there are many gun ranges in America where somebody wouldn't get yelled at and thrown out for texting with one hand while shooting with the other.
Cars ownership is also a drastically larger burden than gun ownership, so that leans the other way. Not only do both parties support driving. But also drivers have a much worse safety culture. Almost all of them regularly speed. They shrug off violations all around them.
this is really bad in general, but the worst part of this translation specifically is retaining "accident" (a failure which also applies to that 404 writer in other articles) www.404media.co/citizen-is-u...
the public willingly engages with many companies tracking them. Unfortunately the most likely reason they'd go after the cameras is the same reason Flock abuse stories go viral but hit and run stories involving Flock never do, i.e., they want driving to be consequence free for drivers.
he's on to something, until they're torn down all urban highways should be exclusively bike lanes
Maybe our car culture has so much inertia that something like Flock can only exist if it's marketed as a solution to crimes unrelated to driving. Then maybe these technical steps to limit surveillance are the best we can hope for. That itself seems to be orders of magnitude more harmful.
Hypothetically, ALPRs could be one tool for detecting unsafe driving by DOTs, akin to the link between fare collection and taping phones to get on a bus. Flock is terrible for detecting moving violations other than hit and runs, which is probably a feature not a bug for their customer base.
Great video about the harms of data brokers and lack of privacy in America. ALPRs are singled out, even though the harm seems to depend on connections. Tech improvements are good but fundamentally we have a political problem of ignoring road safety such that ALPRs are sold for other crimes.
also category error of when to bring up "kill the cop in your head", especially in the context of automated fines with no direct interaction. Of course there are tragic exceptions but drivers as a class are privileged and underpoliced, not a marginalized group bsky.app/profile/poli...
a driving analogue of the NRA saying guns don't kill people, people kill people Automated fines are driver education. If you are an incompetent driver and fail the test of following the most basic and clearly posted safety rules, you pay. The point is to teach drivers before they kill somebody.
this was a joke about a bad restaurant, but it is genuinely hard to open a good small restaurant at that location with no foot traffic to peruse the menu and the imputed cost of parking in their rent. Foodies should support urbanism.
we should be making mutual recognition deals for life saving medicine, not deadly weapons
TIL "dingbat owners" does not necessarily include an adjective
In a decent society I could remind them to stop being a horrible person, politely, but in our reality where this behavior is widespread? idk
Today when we arrived at a children's activity, somebody was sitting in an idling luxury SUV beside the front door and playground full of kids. They were still idling there an hour later. There's sitting room inside, plenty of parking further away, and it was a nice day outside. It's obscene.
okay menu aside I see the problem. They should have started by building a variety of multiunit housing connected by sidewalks, bike paths, and transit. This sort of car oriented development with stroads and massive parking lots, disproportionately favors chains with strong brand recognition.
the material reality of sprawl, and critics of it, have been around even if there's a new culture using new terms
$1 to help him write, $79,999 to tactfully edit away the most embarrassing mistakes without him complaining
ie there's no nice way to share some truths and get society to fix itself. There are political conflicts involved, and solving them entails overcoming political opponents. We should be wise about identifying opponents, but they exist and they are the main barrier to healthy cities.
thinking about a thread yesterday about #urbanism communication and reminded that a century ago it was already clear that adding highway lanes won't fix traffic and that exclusionary zoning lowered property values, yet just those two policies have done much to ruin cities. Urbanism has to organize.
that's a load bearing "counterproductive" for NYT personnel
Car dependency is a systemic problem. But individual choices to get small EVs would collectively weaken at least three of the main special interests pushing car dependency (manufacturers, local car dealers, fossil fuels).
That's just for the initial purchase, plus there's the cost and time spent on registration, insurance, fuel, maintenance. If new car buyers chose small vehicles, and if there wasn't bipartisan opposition by political elites to cheap imports, more affordable EVs would be more common.
There's also a comparison to housing in prime urban real estate. But while those housing costs should be reduced with policy, there's no way to give everyone giant trucks and SUVs. Even with further subsidies for drivers, we don't have space for the vehicles.
The automotive market is complicated, any model is imperfect. I suspect too many people interpret this as inflation akin to egg prices. Relative to eggs it's closer to conspicuous consumption of a rare good by an increasingly wealthy elite, like yachts. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Block is a strong word. It's to send a message slightly stronger than paint, but without actually damaging the vehicles of misbehaving drivers like a bollard would
one police reform that would directly reduce violence, without any additional arrests or training, would be mode shifting cops out of police cars and towards walking, biking, or using transit to get around their communities www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2025/08/25/s...
Same outlet three days ago. Gross. youtu.be/loZEg3PRHR8
The editor is a bad driver, and identifies with the perpetrator.
@jesslovesboats.bsky.social more pods? bsky.app/profile/wtyp...
It mentions speeding up transit, but we have the technology to give buses signal priority.
A hundred metro Tokyos would contain the whole world's population. Getting rid of other cities is neither feasible nor desirable. But yes more density is good for American cities. We, and by we I mean all of earth, need more land returned to wilderness.
Maybe hypothetical future growth would be better placed in new standalone cities rather than ceaseless expansion of current urban cores. Probably some mix. I can worry about it when American cities are filled in again.
I don't know if those terms help planning that far out. Now our cities need infill and mode shift to bikes and transit. The exurbs are a failure of our society, and our NIMBY cities. Maybe we eventually develop those areas, but greenfield development would be preferable to SFHs and overbuilt roads.
Specifically I think we agree that good urbanist communication should try to convince some of those suburbanites to support change, and I've made my own feeble attempt in my writing. A prerequisite there is that they require convincing.
I am sympathetic to your desired communication strategy overall, but this post implies causality. Chronologically, the car dependent planning and grassroots disdain* for anybody who doesn't drive predates that urbanism culture. *I don't think I'm being hyperbolic, your suburb may vary.
But I hear my city council. I hear from parents who move here and recoil at transit. Those urbanist criticisms have a lot of truth. It makes sense for society to invest in infrastructure here. But my municipality definitely needs both carrots and sticks to cooperate.
That's fair. Seems like a good opportunity for suburbanist influencers (I can think of one other popular one). I'd add that I personally live in a suburb, outside of the main city limit, I'm car light, and I'm one of those people advocating for more transit and bike lanes.
valid arguments that there are many changes we should make about powers for levels of government covering different areas, and transportation infrastructure between municipalities fundamnetally depends on that, but within our framework MPOs leveraging federal funds are the best mechanism I know of
The actual line drawing of what's exurb vs suburb is murky. But acknowledging the existence of a line reflects that there are real societal costs to endless sprawl and driving, which is I suspect close to how those urbanists you referred to use "suburb". Which is not helpful.