PieFed.WorldThe car was a fucking mistake
PugJesushttps://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c7decdfb-8b0c-49ed-8c22-928d2eef3185.webp
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Would have been nice if automobile companies hadn't sabotage public transport infrastructure to make a demand for their product and then barely received a slap on the wrist for it.
alexcleacI'd say they not just barely received a slap β they are continued to be praised for "contribution into country economy".
A fucking mistake is when you accidentally enter the wrong whole. Or a teenage pregnancy.
Destroying the country for cars was not a fucking mistake, it was malicious intent.
Look at these streetcars taking profit away from the petrochemical industry being dangerous!
To be fair, streetcars were sometimes a grift that weren't intended to work in the first place. Not all, but some.
See, electric companies pushed for new suburbs to be built with electric streetcars, because if you need to put in all the wiring for a streetcar, you might as well just electrify the entire suburb while you're at it. Which is what electric companies wanted; the streetcars were just an excuse to get the wiring in. They didn't actually care if the streetcars made sense or stuck around, as long as the electric wiring stayed put.
So electric companies would happily push for nonsensical streetcar layouts that maximised the number of electrified households, and then someone else would come along and say "this is idiotic, let's rip it up" (possibly because it's true, possibly because car/oil $$$) and the electric companies wouldn't push back, because they didn't care either way in the first place.
Can someone point me towards good information on this topic? Specifically the city designs before carmaggedon.
There are decent YouTube channels that discuss city design, and they sometimes compare with the old days. My personal favorites are NotJustBikes and CityNerd, with the latter probably more likely to bring up historical info.
What are you talking about? I don't see cities becoming smaller due to cars. Not NYC, Beijing, Jakarta, Bangkok, Dubai, Doha.
Tell me which city? And no, I'm not trying to support cars here, just facts.
Donβt forget investment in public transit like cable cars in that first panel.
And the monorail
I believe that falls under "infrastructure"
lol right?
It's not suburbanization and the automobile, it's a political system based on money-for-access and lobbying, where whichever entity has more money always gradually gets laws and habits changed in a way that advantages them, inexorably.
Large scale long term societal enshittification as a mathematically unavoidable by-product of unfettered capitalism.
Both things can be true bro. Yes, itβs unfettered capitalism in the macro. In the micro, when it comes to how American cities have disintegrated, suburbanization and the automobile are two clear culprits.
No offense, but this is a really obnoxious and unhelpful reply to a post about how suburban sprawl and car-centric infrastructure have really ruined life in the American City. Js.
Certainly wasn't meant to be obnoxious, I just wanted to point out the underlying issue... π€·ββοΈ
I've just binged "The Gilded Age".
The show starts in 1883 NYC. Follows high society. There is a lot of plot points about railways. I don't know how's far the show will go but it's kinda depressing to see β even in acting β what great plans there were for a marvellous railroad network. Had that spirit been kept up instead of being destroyed by industry pushing private cars..
Same assholes though, mostly. (JP Morgan features in the show, as do a bunch of other real life characters). Almost as if a society went after nothing more than money, it'd turn out kinda shit.
You may want to watch Gangs of New York for a look at what it was like for the non-high society folks back then. Very rough!
That's a movie, and in both cases, it's twenty years too old. Both as in it's set 20 years earlier, during the American Civil War, and it was made more than 20 years ago.
I saw it when it came out. It doesn't check any of the boxes that I'm watching "the gilded age for".
As a suggestion this feels like if you saw me with a liquorice pipe and thought "hey, you might enjoy loose snus (or chewing tobacco)."
Like... yeah, there's a connection. But there's also major differences.
Gangs of New York is a great movie though.
But for the itch I'm scratching, I'm now watching Belgravia. I don't want to look at street crazies with razors hidden about their person β I'm watching shows for escapism from reality.
So I'd rather watch people in circles where the worst offense ever is to have sex before being married.
Got enough crazies living on my street challenging me to fights don't need that in my shows.
Edit also unless you want to admire the scenery and dresses, you can honestly pretty much just listen to these, unlike gangs of new york, which has action
On the other hand, they got plenty of exercise and were in a splendid shape.
We didn't have much of a choice when horses were crazy expensive. Once we got cars and phone lines, we realized there was seemingly unlimited space and natural resources, why not?
The car companies sabotaging urban mass transit was what was fucked up.
Fuck cities.
At once? You slag.
Debbie does Dallas
Cities are by far the most environmentally friendly way for large numbers of people to live.
So far! I yearn for us to try out Arcologies. They are basically just cities without sprawl. A man can dreamβ¦
No
Also, unless you live literally in a cabin in the middle of fuck all nowhere, you exist in some form of a city. Just not a metropolitan one.
Town, township, village, hamlet
"City" is doing some heavy lifting here. Not American? Or if so, have you not driven the rural highways?
I've driven through 1 light towns in the past. A city of 3000 is still a city. Even 500 can benefit from trains, sidewalks, and bike lanes.
Our camp is next to a town of 900, but you don't have to go far until neighbors are far between. How thin a density till it's not a city?
And yeah, I'd go out there far more if I could hop a train.
If you hate cities, you should be encouraging everyone to move to them so you can have more rural space to yourself, no?