Quote:
Originally Posted by geoff's two cents
This is debatable for so many reasons:
[Your comment represents something of a tangent to the discussion. Yet, since the mods aren't calling "troll" on this, it seems fair to engage with it, especially since I'm implicated (somewhat unfairly and artificially) as one of the "car-bashers"]
1) The inner-city ghettoization of North America's urban poor from the 1950s to the 1980s, as proto-suburbanites flee the city en masse to escape the influx of racial and cultural "undesirables".
2) The enormous government subsidies required to build automobile-centred communities (at least transit users pay fees), and the shifting of deficit burdens onto everyone (including people who don't use highways personally), which in turn precludes spending on other valuable social commodities - eg. healthcare, education, etc.
3) The further subsidies required to service these unwieldy, disconnected areas with law enforcement, as well as utilities such as roads, sewers, etc.
4) The environmental toll of the automobile, whether in the form of carbon emissions, or that of encroachment onto valuable farm- and wildland by parking lots, freeways, and single family home 'neighborhoods'
5) The social toll of spatially disconnected suburban living
6) The health toll of an increasingly obese generation living in a more polluted environment - again, very taxing for the health-care system
In sum, the automobile as we know it has created enormous problems, alongside making life easier for the people who need it most - eg. tradespeople, commercial shippers, doctors and farmers. Addressing these glaring difficulties is not necessarily about eradicating one form of transport, but rather about rejecting wholesale socialized car-culture, having car owners pay user fees proportionate to the infrastructure they drive on (much like transit-riders who pay to use their system), and spending our tax dollars in ways that yield better fiscal, social and ecological dividends.
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1) No, people like yards. North Americans like white picket fences, swing set, BBQs and gardening. You need property to do that. A condo is not property, it's space above someone else's, or communal, property. How is it wrong for people to want to spend their hard earned money on something tangable, something that is theirs.
As a juxaposition, there are plenty of people who think owning a condo is foolish and absurd because you don't actually own property, you own a cube in the sky.
2) Such is the way of organized scociety. Next, are you going to argue that the health care system is unfair because healthy people pay to take care of sick people or that rich people pay a higher burden than the poor? No, of course not.
The same is true with the automobile. Even if someone doesn't use a highway, their quality of life is still largely shaped by their existence. Even if you walk to work, maybe your coworkers who contribute to your company, making it a success, thus keeping you employed, do commute by car. Statistics indicate that the majority of people still drive, therefore the success of our economy is dependent on people using roadways to get to work. Your company, and your job depends on those roads existing. So if you pay taxes that go to roads you do not use, your life still benefits from that happening.
3) I didn't realize there were washrooms on the Viaduct, I should check that out next time. Joking aside, I thought adding residences would require an addition of facilities, more sewage (that needs to be disposed of), more garbage, more electricity on lines at capacity, more natural gas, and more area and homes that need police and security.
4) Again, I have to say our society is pretty well off. What do we need with more farm land. With what we have, we already produce more food per capita than we did 20 years ago, and it's only improving. With proper land and farm management, that we don't practice here as much as in Europe or even back east, we can produce the same we do now with half the land. Large swaths of the ALR in the Okanagan are being converted from orchard to vineyard, yet food in the supermarket is as cheap as it has ever been.
What kind of sacrifices would we have to make to our standard of living if we didn't have the automobile or the single family home?
I don't understand how your utopia of infinite farmland, unheard of density, and absence of the automobile would be any better than our current civilization or actually work at all.
5) What social disconnect are you referring to exactly? As far as I can tell, small towns and suburban communities have safer neighborhoods, and lower instances of crime. The Lower East Side, IS whats left of the original downtown. The suburbs have allowed generations of Canadians to be born and live happy lives. I don't know about you, but I feel safer and more happy walking around in Newton than I do the DTES, Granville Street, or Gastown, or in other major cities like San Fransisco, London, Toronto, or New York.
6) An unhealthy lifestyle isn't necessarily associated with the automobile. I know just as many malnourished people to the point of being scary thin who are broke by paying off the mortgage of their downtown condo, as I do who are fat. I also know many people who live in suburbs and take advantage of using expansive parks for things like baseball and soccer, and go for walks and play tennis. I also know people who live downtown and all they do is walk to and from work, and because they never leave the core, they never do anything physically fit, and are thus fat or otherwise unhealthy. The number of people I know who jog or play sports is many times greater in the suburbs than in the urban areas.
If anything, our obese lifestyle is brought on by the availability of high fructose foods easily accessible and cheap because of the expansive amounts of land we have available to farm. Our vast amounts of farmland contribute to us having vast amounts of food, which contributes to it being cheap to consume, which contributes to us being fat.
EDIT (addition)
Look at a country like India, where their road infrastructure is paralyzing the country. Over half of all perishable goods expire on trucks while en route to market. Our quality of life is as such, because of roads and cars, not in spite.
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Thanks for the invite, BCPhil, but I've made my peace with most everyone else on this forum who don't share my views wholesale. If you read my previous post (or even read the original carefully), you would be unlikely to come away with the impression that I was suggesting that cars and the people who use them are inherently evil. My original post was intended as a corrective to the flawed notion that cars represent an increase in the standard of living, pure and simple. You don't need to accept every single point in order to acknowledge that a simplistic value judgment one way or the other is unhelpful. I was going for some nuance - perhaps this was a mistake on an online forum.
Right on.
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