You all do realize that suburbs existed before the invention of the car right? American infrastructure is bad but it’s not irredeemable, the assumption that we can’t provide public transportation to these places because of a lack of resources is malthusian. And sure some places like the American Southwest and Florida are legitimately over human population carrying capacity due to climate change but in general the earth as a whole isn’t, and cities like Amsterdam are just as unsustainable as Miami since even though has one of those le epic reddit notjustbikes cityskylines approved infrastructure, both are below the sea level.
I think in general our message should be abolish the need to own the automobile, any measures meant to limit car use should target the rich before the poor. And that trains are good, and that a high speed train across the United States would be a rather popular project in the eyes of even the chuds. And by god stop calling for the suburbs to be razed, stop trying to be zoomer Robert Moses.
This has proven insufficient to keep places free of car bullshit. Take Manhattan. You don't need a car. It's still full of cars polluting and honking and occasionally crushing a person to death.
I think abolition of the private automobile, once it has a foothold, will prove an easier sell than cities where you don't need a car but can still drive one.
In car-allowed cities outside of NYC, everyone with two nickels to rub together will have a car. The people with any pull in city design will definitely keep them. As such, the bar for a functioning transit system is that it can deliver the working class to their workplaces to work a 9-5. There's no political pressure to make it comfortable, to reduce the number of transfers per commute or to run late so people without cars can enjoy nightlife outside of their immediate neighborhoods. The transit remains shitty because the people who suffer from its shittiness are poor and thus don't count. All US cities outside of NYC: you are here. Nobody outside of your city cares about your city's new bike lane because nobody's getting out of that rut by building a bike lane every 5 years.
Conversely, in a truly car-free city, the richest dickheads in town will complain loudly when the transit sucks, as it will personally inconvenience them. The transit gets better quickly because they get what they want and they'll end up with quiet, dense neighborhoods with great transit. Everyone will want to move there or mimic it in their own cities. It would be a dictatorship of the bourgeois pedestrian, which is obviously far short of where we want to be overall, but it sure beats a dictatorship of the bourgeois SUV driver.
Why do you even bother to lurk here if you aren't going to learn any theory and just throw around terms uselessly?
Why would the market sort this out? Infrastructure projects are not dictated by the 'bourgeoisie pedestrians' or 'bourgeoisie SUV owner', you are literally just meaninglessly throwing the word 'bourgeoisie' onto everything as a fucking cultural signifier without understanding what it means. American outputs are not dictated by the market, otherwise they wouldn't spend so much money on marketing, they are dictated by what the bourgeoisie want to build and sell. The difference between the U.S. and China is that the FIRE bourgeoisie (see how it's related to the means of production) doesn't control literally everything China builds. There is no political pressure to do so because local politics are completely wrapped around the finger of real estate concerns and have been from the jump of this country. Even in my city, local townships have to fight against the local city council annexing land to sell to their private developer friends. One piece has literally been illegally annexed three times only to be given back to the the township on appeal, but most of the time it just goes through and then in three years we have another suburb with no bus or even sidewalks going to it, this when there is a huge potential and demand for large affordable housing complexes in the city itself with old industrial buildings that need to be torn down. We don't live in a country that caters to demand, we live in a country that caters to profitability.
The wealthy already build enclaves, and they all look like the exurbs south of San Jose, huge lots of land with giant houses and lots of cars surrounded by security personnel an hour away from everything else.
It's an analogy. I'll make it explicit with ordered pairs where the first argument pertains to economics in general and the second is transit-specific.
Cars being allowed is like capitalism in that the amenities available to one group of people (the working class, non-drivers) are controlled by another (the bourgeoisie, drivers). That can turn out horribly (the US, Columbus' not having a subway) or somewhat OK for now (Scandinavian model, SF BART). The problem with shooting for "somewhat OK for now" is that when things get tight, the class that calls the shots can and will yoink the nice things away -- (austerity measures in Sweden, BART almost shutting down weekend services).
The solution is to upend the class dynamic itself via (revolution, car ban).
A 'car-ban' without any redistribution of wealth or reallocation of the means of production is not analogous to a 'revolution'. They are not equivalent terms, and this is not an equivalent analogy. You are just misusing terms and pretending that it is somehow Marxist or Maoist because you've structured the argument to appear like that. It's even worse because there is no need to use analogy here! We know how this works! We can watch it happen in real time!
The reason that it is not equivalent is that 'drivers' do not dictate where the roads go. The real estate bourgeoisie, in partnership with the state, dictate where the roads go. If you want to ban cars, you have to start with attacking the power of the owners of the real estate. There is no point in attacking commodity production or usage in a city you do not have immediate control over, it is a fight you cannot win long-term politically because the very financial materialist nature of the city politics is tied up in real estate ventures and they will always be able to outbid you. My point is that it is a fight that you will not win. If you are going to fight a losing battle, you might as well fight for one that actually matters, that is actually revolutionary.
Drivers as a whole, no. If you're a poor driver, you have no say. I'm not saying that all drivers have a say, I'm saying that everyone who has a say is a driver.
Could you share your reasoning on real estate necessarily being on the side of cars? A car-free zone in Manhattan where the residents aren't subject to incessant honking would be the most attractive place there and everyone who owns land there could make bank.
Again, things are not driven by popular demand. The idea that things are driven by popular consumer demand is liberal market mythology. They are driven by profitability, and the profitability on larger single housing buildings is better because it's a one-time large negotiated purchase, rather than multiple small fish negotiations. Profitability always wants to cater to the whale because it is easier to sit on an asset and then jackpot, and there are no bigger whales than at this time in capitalism. This then moves on to my second point, which is more on the ideological side of the materialist dialectic.
Have you ever actually met or known any rich people in the U.S.? I don't mean their fail-children that pretend to slum it up, or influencer-rich. I mean, honest-to-god 1% old-wealth rich people. They hate interacting with the public. They want to be as far away from the public as possible at all times. Even other rich people that they don't know or haven't been introduced to. These people already have private gardens, private gyms, private drivers, private everything there is no need for them to have a public space. The way they live is completely alien. They are on the side of cars because the car is a private space that separates them from the public. It probably doesn't even occur to them that they would like to be able to walk somewhere and walk back without a car. They just have whatever they need delivered, and then drive or are driven to wherever they want to walk around. The whales don't demand walkability, they demand privacy, and the car provides privacy. You say they could make bank, but they know in their hearts that's not true, and even if it were, I doubt it would even occur to them to ask. They assume everybody wants what they have, everyone values what they value, and that is what they are going to provide. Eternal private spaces.
Are you talking about houses? I'm talking about a policy that should start in Manhattan. I don't think the bulk of Manhattan's real estate wealth is in the 86 houses listed on Zillow. People with land there already let out a lot of low-privacy housing in buildings where they wouldn't live. Similarly, Tucker Carlson isn't eating Swanson frozen dinners and John Kerry probably doesn't douse his sandwiches in Heinz ketchup.
Look, I don't know enough about Manhattan real estate to speculate on the exact ownership breakdown, but if it anywhere like where I live, it is difficult to get real estate developers and city-councils to even build simple apartment housing, let alone create a 'car-free' zone. At most you can get a historic public mall block that only caters to shops, if you're lucky.
You were the one advocating for policy that would cause the 'richest dickheads' in town to advocate for better public transit. Not me. I'm just telling you what's likely going to happen. Every set of moneyed interests will oppose you every step of the way because it is about maintaining their private spaces than creating a well maintained, car-free, public space, and if they are the ones with the power to create it, it will become a nearly vacant zone with lots of empty housing that is outside of the price point of most of the people that desire those kinds of living conditions.
If you do not change who controls the means and ownership of production, none of these consumer projects will work or have the intended consequences you desire. The bourgeoisie pedestrian is the same man as the bourgeoisie SUV owner. They are inseparable in their class characteristics and interests. Best of luck in your project though. If it does succeed, it will be interesting to see if my prediction is wrong. I hope it is, but I am pretty sure it's not.
It . . . isn't anything like where you live. Why would you assume it was, repeatedly, up to and including this post? If you've only seen NYC in movies, Manhattan is the big, dense pointy place. It's not pointy from end to end, but as far as residences go, it's pretty much all apartments. Lots of people have written a lot about it and taken pictures of it from many different angles.
I don't mean physically. I mean financially in terms of ownership percentages, individual owners vs. corporate landlords vs. individual landlords. Clearly, the apartment building part has already happened, and happened a century ago, in Manhattan, but what are the percentages of new developments? What are the percentages of remodeling? What is in need of demolition? How active is the new real estate market, who does it primarily cater to, and how do those residents live and work?
But none of this addresses the actual concern here, which is that I fundamentally do not believe that rich people led consumer initiatives will change things for the greater populace, particularly when it is about forcing the wealthy into public spaces. But again, good luck with your initiative, hopefully it works out the way you want it to.
If you didn't mean physically, what did you mean when you said
? Also,
Why the continued ignorance? Apartments are going up all the time. Please learn about stuff before spouting off.
That was when I didn't know we were talking about Manhattan specifically. In the Midwest, that is definitely the strategy, either car-oriented suburbs or duplex housing. There is no escaping the sprawl, even when there are better and more compact public transit oriented development methods available.
That's great! Hopefully they are affordable. When I lived in Oakland, they redeveloped a bunch of downtown, but they made it all way outside the price range of anybody not making more than $100,000 a year combined income and now downtown is a comparable ghost town to what it was when I was younger, with people generally moving to the Oakland suburbs. The whole city has been ok in terms of growth, but what would have really given it a shot in the arm is cheap apartment complexes that allowed people to BART into SF or other East Bay places. But that was not what was developed.
Maybe NYC is completely different, you guys have the status of the Big Apple to draw in the wealthy people and you guys at least already have some higher degree of public transit in place to facilitate a car ban.
Actually, looking at the whole growth model there, damn a whole 33% of buildings built after 2000 with over 60% of them being 50+ occupancy. That's fantastic. And it certainty looks like there is a demand for it. You know what, fuck it, if I ever move there I'd canvas for this shit, there's some real potential here. I don't know if it will translate to other city real estate markets, but there is definitely something going on in Manhattan.
This is why I love this site. You did your research, we didn't have to go 13 more rounds and now I can get back to the Sopranos. It's something else there. I moved away when it was pretty shut down for covid, might be headed back up soon.
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Fuck you, asshole.
Where I live the population growth rate is double the state population growth rate. We are booming (at the expense of all the little rural towns around us, but still) but about 77% of the infrastructure being developed is 4-6 occupancy suburban houses and duplexes, with the rest being top 10% income bracket apartments. My point is that they are developing entirely around cars. You can't pass a popular ban on cars in the city here without first developing infrastructure that isn't car centric, and the only way to develop non-car centric stuff is through politics, and the political councils of my area are completely dominated by the real estate interest groups who like doing these large or expensive development projects because it makes them more money than catering to affordable apartment housing with good bus infrastructure.
Manhattan is taking a different development route, with their development focusing on 50+ occupancy buildings, all over the income spectrum, with an already in-place transit system. Therefore, it might actually be possible to push for a popular car-ban. An outside shot, but possible.