Comment by ATsch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ATsch | Hacker News Reader

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> Was telling people about trains and cars creating a need where there wasn’t one?

That's a great example actually, because the reason you can't get anywhere without a car these days is marketing campaigns by the automobile and oil industry. First by suggesting the newly necessary road safety standards and ridiculing people for being in the street without a car ("jaywalking") to the point that it was criminalized, then by sponsoring enormous displays about the glorious car-dependent future at multiple world fairs (GMs "Futurama" holds the attendance record at 5 million visitors to this day), shutting down streetcar companies via lobbying and acquisitions and eventually even providing the US secretary of defense, who then used the defense budget to bulldoze inner cities to run highways through them. A development that caused the US to have the highest car dependence, car ownership and transport emissions of any large nation today.

So yes, I think it's fair to say there was a bit of artificial need created here.

>because the reason you can't get anywhere without a car these days is marketing campaigns by the automobile and oil industry

We aren't all brainless automatons. Not everything is a giant conspiracy. Have you considered that there are people that actually like cars and find them convenient and useful? Cars and the highway system completely changed the course of commerce in this country. Sure, that has lead to some problems we're going to have to correct, but this idea that a bunch of moustache-twirling executives sat in a board room figuring out how to force cars on people is a bit much.

I was about to reply that this is exactly what happened in L.A. in the 1940s and suggest that you look up the "Great American Streetcar Conspiracy", my favorite example of monopolistic conspiracy. But apparently much has changed since I last did that myself, and now the conspiracy seems to be little more than... fake news.

Unless of course we're in the midst of a "Great American Streetcar Conspiracy"-Conspiracy Conspiracy. ;-)

That is a bit of a misleading way of putting it. There was indeed a "street car conspiracy" and it even led to criminal convictions. The interpretation that this conspiracy was intended to kill off street cars is harder to justify since street cars were already struggling in the aftermath the great depression andany were bankrupt. I do think that the actions of GM et all did accelerate the decline of the street car but the urban myth about is "Great American Streetcar Company" is generally overblown.

Streetcars and public transport in general should never be run on a for profit basis.

> public transport in general should never be run on a for profit basis

Japan seems to do fine [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Japan

Japan is a special case in many ways.

"can be run on a profit" and "should only be run if it is profitable" are very, very different things.

Infrastructure like trains or roads are a huge net benefit to society already, if they can make a profit too that's neat but it shouldn't be the goal.

> Have you considered that there are people that actually like cars and find them convenient and useful? Cars and the highway system completely changed the course of commerce in this country.

Cars would have been wildly successful without marketing, but the deliberate marketing efforts of car companies significantly amped up that demand and pushed us into being a society that is unheathily dependant on these amazing machines.

> this idea that a bunch of moustache-twirling executives sat in a board room figuring out how to force cars on people is a bit much.

This "idea" is strongly backed up by the historic record, so if this seems like "too much" you really need to recalibrate your intuitions with reality.

In this case it was a giant open conspiracy. It wasn't secret.

> a bunch of moustache-twirling executives sat in a board room figuring out how to force cars on people is a bit much.

That's pretty much exactly what happened. I don't know that they twirled their mustaches though, I'm sure they all thought they were doing the right thing.

"The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM

It was a classic case of "seemed like a good idea at the time".

> Sure, that has lead to some problems we're going to have to correct,

That's pretty facile. For one thing more people (in the USA) have died directly from cars crashes than from all the wars we've fought. For another there's the pollution: exhaust is deadly poisonous, tires wear down and shed millions of tons of tiny particles of vulcanized rubber into the environment, the fuel we burn contributes to the Greenhouse Effect, the asphalt of the roads is toxic, and there are so many roads and so much pavement that it affects planetary albedo. Then there are the unquantifiable changes to the social order: streets used to be public ways for everyone, now they are the domain of the automobile and people are confined to the sidewalks for fear of mayhem and death. I could go on and on.

I think if an alien landed here and looked around one of it's first reactions would be, "WTF is up with all these cars!?"

I'm not sure what part of my message lead you to believe I didn't think people enjoyed cars?

The problem is that it wasn't enough for cars to be a useful tool for those that needed it, but that they needed to be a source of endless growth, and marketing played a crucial role in that.

There's no need for mustache twirling here. Car companies rationally maximized their profit by selling to everyone they could, rationally removed barriers to car adoption by removing everyone else from the road and rationally created new markets for their product by encouraging sprawling cities and enormous highways, which also acted as a competitive moat. They then disregarded the consequences, not because they were evil, but because their job was to maximize car sales, not the car's benefit to humanity.

All of this is just things working as intended.

Not to speak of a promised sense of freedom you could only ever possibly obtain by driving around in the right kind of car and smoking the right brand of cigarettes.

>a promised sense of freedom you could only ever possibly obtain by driving around in the right kind of car

You do realize that having the ability to hop in your car and drive wherever you want to go without having to report to anyone provides an incredible amount of freedom, right?

You don't need a car for this. You can use trains and other means of transportation.

Take a look at other countries. Japan, Singapore, France with cities like Paris, Netherlands with cites like Amsterdam, which transformed from a car centric city in the 1950s to now a very lively city with lots of bikes and public transport.

Who are you "reporting" to when you catch a train? Also, in cars, you're using Google maps which is tracking you, you're license plate is fully visible which allows you to be tracked, there are ticketing cameras, aerial monitoring, tool booths, speed traps... Yea sure pretty free.

You do realize that navigating infastucture designed exclusively for cars without one has a much larger negative impact on your freedom?

This view is probably too US-centric. There is a lot of the world (including developed world), where people get around everyday without relying on cars for everything.

I do not negate your point that marketing has a strong component of creating a need where there isn't one. But, its success in doing so relies on a strong combination of cultural, economic and political backgrounds.

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