Originally Posted by
cooker
Sprawl is demonstrably a bad thing, but this is not about you - you happen to be living car-light in a car-heavy area and good for you, so no need to take it personally. Sprawl squanders farmland, increases air pollution and shortens life expectancy due to both ill health and car crashes. This is not opinion. However the fact that I know this and you may reject it does not make us aliens to each other - I'm sure there are vastly different points of view among you and your neighbours on many topics ranging from Donald Trump to the Oscars. yet you still generally get along and have interests in common.
And although this is overall a cycling forum, this particular sub-forum does not have to be totally about bikes, or the love of bikes - the forum description provides a lot of latitude around discussing other forms of transprotation and the lifestyle in general. So I really don't get the hostility to people engaging in that broader discussion. You can ignore it, you can argue for your point of view, or you can start threads that reflect your interests (which apparently includes the issues we are discussing in this thread you started).
As for common ground, at the end of the day we all have one big piece of common ground which is called Earth, and all of our fates are tied to how we share it.
I believe it is because this forum has become or maybe always was more of a part of the car free movement with a main focus on environmental, social and political issues using cycling as a smoke screen to get people involved in the debates on those issues. Where we differ is in the solutions. This may all be opinion on my part but it does come from visiting and posting here for some time and reading the links and even some of the suggested books posted by some here to back up their assumptions.
Yes we have the earth in common. How we deal with the issues is the differences. Some here believe they can be dealt with on a social political level and I don't. People will deal with all of those issues as best as they can and seems to be working in technology to do so. I don't see political solutions or social engineering or city restructuring as a working solution as demonstrated by the last posted link. So while all of the late night coffee shop pontificating can be fun, like it was in college, it doesn't change much. I doubt if it helps cycling in the long run.