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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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urbanism
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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.