People responding to this with "ordinary Americans love giant land yachts" & it's driving me crazy. If you think Americans have some kind of innate, inborn love of grotesquely large, unsafe vehicles, congrats, you are a Sucker For Capitalism. The car companies thank you.
https://twitter.com/KateAronoff/status/1493043238843957250
Related. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
OK, I gotta do other stuff, but a final word on this. The US ripped out numerous functional public-transit systems; we built wide roads surrounded by single-family neighborhoods; we developed land-use regs that discourage dense walkability & practically mandate sprawl;
... we made buying SFHs easy & cheap; we held gas taxes low even as other democracies were raising them; we didn't price a wide range of externalities into vehicle & fuel prices; we crafted fuel-economy standards practically custom-designed to encourage size/weight bloat;
... we prioritize roads & parking above all in transportation policy & empower NIMBYs to block anything in the other direction; we allowed state depts. of transportation to be utterly captured & run by the roads/sprawl lobby;
... car companies, which make far more profit on land yachts (in part due to the previously listed decisions), relentlessly advertise bigger vehicles, make them cheaper & more available, & bias the car-dealership monopoly to favor them. I could go on.
The point is, these were all decisions made by corporations & the governments those corporations more or less own. They were not responses to some ineffable American character; they were deliberate efforts to *shape American behavior & preferences*.
Now here we are -- surrounded by infrastructure devoted to cars, awash in cheap gas, public transit systems starved of funding, laws shaped around cars, regulations designed to increase car use & car size, culture inundated by ads & propaganda pushing us toward big cars ...
... and people are all, "oh, I guess this is just how Americans are! We just love sprawl and big cars, because of the ineffable American Character™️, & auto companies & the governments they've captured are just helpfully responding to our desires!" It's maddening.
The point is not to condemn anyone's personal preferences (which of course *feel* authentic). It's just to say: this did not simply happen. It is this way for reasons & *we could decide to do things differently*. There will be challenges, but national character is not among them.
Final bit & then I really gotta quit. Americans suffer sky-high rates of obesity, heart disease, & diabetes. You could say, "well, what can you do, Americans just prefer highly processed, carb-laden food & sugary soda! It's how they are!" You can see how *that's* dumb, right?
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