The Biggest Threat to America? Cars

Transportation has been a hot topic over the past few years. I’ve almost decided to give it its own category because I write about it so much. There’s more talk of trains, cars, and public transportation coming along and in this video, we are talking about the problem with cars. As I talked in my Podcast episode about the Interstate system, hate against cars is nothing new. People have been hating on cars since at least the 1970s and some of it goes back to the 1920s. To hear some folks, tell it, you’d think that every problem could be solved if we simply deleted the automobile from existence. Never mind that getting around would become exponentially harder for everyone, especially vulnerable people. No one talks about the difficult with weather, walking, transit frequency, and other problems that go along with moving a lot of people via public means. It also means that people will simply travel less. For some folks on twitter who are climate fanatics, that is a fine compromise.

I won’t say that car transportation doesn’t have its problems. No one likes traffic, interstates take up a lot of space. America is a rather unwalkable country outside of a few places and getting around without a car in most places is a pain and after decades of the car, it’s designed that way. It is a problem worth addressing. However, to demonize cars as the progenitor of all our problems is quite unfair. The car enabled people to leave cities behind and move farther out from job centers. In many cases, jobs followed those movements. The car allows people to see friends relatives, and get around wide areas with door to door transportation without being beholden to any schedule. There is a reason the car became a representation for freedom. It was not merely clever advertising by Ford, GM, and Chrysler, it represented a whole new lifestyle. That lifestyle is now under attack.