Originally Posted by
RPK79
The auto industry spends money on advertising to sell their cars? The oil industry spends money to counter lobbying groups trying to put them out of business? Why won't these industries just roll over and die!?
What I've noticed is that automotive interests construe basically ANY reduction in automotive demand as life-threatening to the industry. It would be like restaurant interests trying to dissuade people from cooking at home because they equate growth of home-cooking with the demise of their sector.
Originally Posted by
Mobile 155
Except even if we follow Roody's mantra of forget what the studies publish and only believe what we see then after a spike in 1973 cycling has not gained in the US at all percentage wise and has decreased in Both China and India by more people than ever rode bikes in the US in the first place. Yes it does seem to be changing right under our noses and before our very eyes.
This car-dominance vs. car-free debate keeps seeming more and more like the debate between pro-slavery and abolitionism ante-bellum. Supposedly Lincoln had argued to allow slavery to die on its own because he believed that would happen gradually; and he only became more actively abolitionist after the Kansas-Nebraska act allowed slavery to expand into new territories. The argument was that if slavery was popular among the majority in a state, 'popular sovereignty' should reign and the (free) people of that state should be allowed to use slavery.
The same suggestion is made all the time with regards to motor-vehicle dominance in infrastructure. The idea is that if driving is popular among a majority of people in an area, why should their popular sovereignty be questioned and measures taken to facilitate other forms of transportation? Well, cars are not slaves and there is no reason to abolish all driving but there are already cities where it is practically impossible to choose life without driving and that raises the question of at what point people are no longer free to live car-free.
What's more, I don't believe that if everyone simply accepted driving as more or less a cultural-economic mandate that the resulting economy would be sustainable. In fact, I don't believe the economic growth of the automotivist and consumerist expansion of the New Deal century ever has been sustainable. Therefore it's really not just a question of majority preference or cultural-economic imperative but rather alternative transportation is necessary to escape the self-annihilating economy in which everyone competes to be one of the people driving around everywhere but significant numbers of people end up unemployed, criminalized, sent off to war, etc. because the economy simply can't sustainably accommodate population growth with everyone driving and expanding sprawl perpetually.