Hacker News Reader

Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

That's because prior to being too old to drive, they didn't give a fuck about the public transportation system. Actually, even after being too old to drive, they happily continue to vote against public transportation.

It's bizarre to suggest our transportation system is failing them. It's exactly the transportation system they voted for, the transportation system a good bunch of them built, designed, railroaded through poor communities, terraformed cities to support. It's been failing large swaths of people for many centuries, but that generation didn't bother. They built this shrine to the personal automobile.

It's not even a case of buyers remorse. For the longest time in their life, they happily took advantage of limitless cheap fossil fuels, plenty of unregulated cars and wide roads to drive them on, and the best part, they managed to put it all on the tab for the next generation. Its Caligula all over.

View on HN

It's baby boomers. Overwhelmingly the baby boomers I know are all: driving is a right, not a privilege, and I'm insured and insurance solves all problems and mistakes, rip out those damn trees and put in more car lanes so I don't have to wait in traffice. Gimme! And my grandparents' generation were fans of the bus and trollies before big oil got them ripped out of most American cities in favor of buses, and wanted people in general to have an easier time to get around.

The article should be renamed to "Our transportation systems fails the seniors who neglected to build it".

Well, it wasn't really "them". It was General Motors, and Firestone Tires, and the oil companies. [1]

In other words, giant corporate interests working together to shape the country in the way that benefited them.

"What's good for GM is good for America"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

I generally agree, but "many centuries"? Come on. :)

ha, imho, it reads as a stylistic choice that fits the exasperated tone I think.

But there's a certain logic to that statement too. American cities always had very wide streets, 100 years before the car was invented even. In hindsight, it's hard to rationalize why really, but it seemed to have been because of this obsession for utility and practicality. Those very wide rigid grids were a transport-oriented design choice. To keep the horse shit away, so carts could make U-turns, so you could dump your bathwater in the middle.

The tragedy was that those wide streets were the seed for cars eventually destroying urban cores. When cars were invented, they had the space for them right there. A street that was used for everything (markets, recreation, horses, ...), suddenly became a 4-5 lane highway filled with loud, stinking, dangerous cars. Of course nobody wants to live next to that, it's genuinely awful. It set in motion a vicious cycle of people moving out of the cores and needing more parking-infrastructure to accommodate that commuting.

I totally agree with you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com