This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
When reading Is Seattle a 15-minute city? this morning, I couldn't help thinking about what's missing from it. For context, the 15-minute city is an urbanist idea about making every residential area a 15-minute walk to important amenities like grocery stores. It's a good idea if it could be achieved without incurring too many other costs, and it's the other costs that I couldn't help thinking about. Specifically, crime.
The metric "walking time to the nearest supermarket" I'm sure correlates closely to rate of property crimes. Where I live, homeless encampments tend to spring up close to grocery stores. These things are related.
I'm very sympathetic to concerns about car dependence, and how much better life could be if housing was built closer to stores, schools, and workplaces. But the problem is always crime. Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals, even if it also screens out some upstanding citizens who cannot or will not drive. Suburbia is the epitome of this phenomenon, where everything is too far from anything else to live without a car. In cities that are naturally denser, there are constant fights over zoning that dance around this issue but don't address it directly (at least when the participants are nominally progressive and need to be seen as non-discriminatory).
There's a more general point here, which is this: discrimination is required for a well-functioning society. I'm using 'discrimination' in the more technical sense here, as "To make a clear distinction; distinguish." The concept of statistical discrimination covers a lot of what I mean here, but discrimination based on signaling is important too.
Statistical discrimination is basically using Bayesian inference, using information that's already available or easy to get, to make inferences about hidden or illegible traits that predict some important outcome. In the context of walkability, people who don't own cars are more likely to commit crimes or to be bad customers and neighbors than people who do own cars. So you end up with a better-behaving local population if you require a car.
By discrimination based on signaling I mean things like choice of clothing, personal affect and mannerism, accent, vocabulary, presence of tattoos, etc. These things are useful for statistical discrimination, but they're under conscious control of the person in question, and they're hard to fake. They basically prove "skin in the game" for group membership. It takes time and effort to develop a convincing persona that will get you accepted into a different social class, and higher social classes have much stricter standards of behavior. Basically the guy speaking in Received Pronunciation, with no tattoos, who uses PMC vocabulary and dresses in upper-middle-class business attire is very unlikely to rob you, because it would be very costly to him. He'd lose his valuable class status for doing something so base.
Why is discrimination required for a well-functioning society? Because every choice is almost by definition discriminatory, and preferentially making positive-sum choices leads to a positive-sum society. Imagine if you made zero assumptions about a new person you met, aside from "this is a human." You wouldn't be able to talk to them (you'd be assuming their language), you wouldn't know what kind of etiquette to use, you'd have no idea whether they're going to kill you for doing something they consider obscene; you wouldn't be able to get any value out of the interaction. If instead you inferred based on their appearance that they're a middle-class elderly American woman who speaks English, you could immediately make good choices about what to talk about with them.
I'm sure this is all pretty obvious to anyone rationalist-adjacent, but I had a confusing conversation with a more left-leaning relative recently who seemed to have internalized a lot of the leftist ideas that are basically of the form "statistical discrimination is useless." Setting aside topics outside the Overton window like HBD, even for questions like "does the fact that a person committed a crime in the past change the likelihood they'll commit a crime in the future, all else equal?" the assumption seemed to be "no." Michael Malice's assertion seems to be true, that answering "are some people better than others" is the most precise way to distinguish right-wing from left-wing.
Bringing this to the culture war, there is a scientific or factual answer to every question "does observable fact X predict outcome Y", and pointing out that leftist assumptions contradict the evidence is how to convince reasonable people that the leftist assumption is false. I'm speaking as a person living in one of the most left-leaning places in the country, so the false leftist assumptions are the ones that most harm my life. Rightist assumptions of course also contradict the evidence, but I don't have salient examples.
The astute observer will note that most of the leftist intellectual movement of the last 50 years is trying to poison the evidence (via ad hominem and other fallacious arguments). How can one improve the quality of evidence when the wills of so many high-status people are set against it?
P.S. I'm sorry for the emotional tone of this post. This community is the only place I have to talk about this and I appreciate your thoughts.
To me, this seems like one of those things where the disease is worse than the cure, but people don't realize it. Driving is very dangerous; for example, several times more Americans are killed every year in car crashes (including people outside of automobiles being hit). One could certainly argue about all of the relevant costs of crime vs cars, but at the very least it's worth thinking seriously about, and I suspect most Americans don't weigh them anywhere close to what really makes sense.
(I should emphasize, this doesn't mean I think crime doesn't matter, or people should just suck up having to deal with it, or anything like that. A number of American cities have done themselves a great disservice by failing to do anything about crime, homeless encampments, etc. and having lots of these things in your neighborhood is a legitimate concern.)
This is definitely an under-recognized consideration. This is data from 2012-2014, but in those years the average number of traffic deaths per year in Manhattan was 40. In Queens it was 93. [Staten Island]9https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/prevention/injury_prevention/traffic/county/richmond/2014/richmond_co_res_fs.pdf) was 17; Brooklyn was 94, and the Bronx was 48. That is 292 per year in a city of 8 million. If the entire US had that traffic death rate, there would have been 12,000 deaths per year, rather that [32,000](https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812246#:~:text=Overall%20Statistics,2013%20(see%20Figure%201). And, no, the numbers don't change much if you add the fifty or so subway deaths per year, most of which were suicides.
PS: I am sure someone will be tempted to respond with a claim about the benefits of cars. Please don't, because I agree with you about the benefits. I merely am noting that traffic deaths is "an under-recognized consideration", not that, on balance, the costs outweigh the benefits.
They're not "under-recognized" because we hear about it them the time. Former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio spent years pushing his "Vision Zero Action Plan" and his replacement Eric Adams has been banging on about it too.
It is underrecognized as a** cost of driving **. Obviously, "it would be sound public policy to reduce traffic deaths" is a common sentiment
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I believe you underestimate the side effects of the cure. Cars are a tremendous tool for personal freedom with all that entails. Making their ownership less common means curtailing exit rights for many, and placing more control in the hands of those that manage both public transport and the restrictive legislation that is supposed to enable this urban planning.
How much freedom do those cars provide to children, anyone with a disability that prevents them from driving, people who are too old to drive safely, or anyone for whom a car is a significant expense? Or even someone who just dislikes driving? Who gets to experience those exit rights when housing is so expensive?
Cars are still entirely dependent on the government decides to do. Where roads go, when roads are closed, how lights and signs are used to direct traffic flow, road maintenance, etc. I'm all for freedom, but heavily-subsidized "freedom" is a contradiction in terms and an illusion. Dense, walkable, urban environments with a mix of things are what people created spontaneously. Car-dependent suburban sprawl is what the top-down planners created over the past 70 years.
Yes, cars provide some benefits. They also have a lot of costs.
Even for adults with a driving licence, cars only provide freedom in an environment designed for it. That cars provide the illusion of freedom because of an extensive system of government roads is trite, and that the US does not collect enough in gas taxes to fund state highways is well-known. That private car use is associated with an extensive system of licensing and enforcement that is the main cause of negative interactions between government employees and non-career-criminal citizens is also well-known - the "cars are freedom" brigade claim that this enforcement is a tyrannical imposition on them by Blue Tribe car-haters, but when you relax it people start dying.
The bigger issue is parking. A car is a very good way of moving 1-4 people, with luggage, exactly when they want, with the people having full control over their in-journey environment; but only if the journey is from one parking space to another and only if the second parking space is vacant at the time the car gets to it. Driving in London simply doesn't create the sense of freedom that the open road does - partly because of the traffic, but mostly because you can't park anywhere you want to go. Driving in Long Island, on the other hand (I spent a summer working at Brookhaven), does feel freeing because even when the traffic sucks, you are still able to go where you want when you want in a non-shared space and expect convenient parking at your destination. But the price of that freedom is that anywhere you might want to go turns out to be (to Londoners' eyes) a shed on the edge of a giant parking lot.
Delivering enough parking that driving feels freeing requires YUUGE government intervention. Parking mandates are by far the most consequential piece of American land use regulation. Parking scarcity is the main stated reason for NIMBYs NIMBYing.
Even in rural areas, it isn't the people who ruin the popular beauty spots, it's the parked cars. The open road is fun, but when anywhere you might want to stop turns into a battle for a spot, it kills the experience. The only serious crash I have been in was while circling for parking at Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park - Yellowstone has already crossed the "visiting the popular bits is unpleasant because parking" threshold and they need to do what Zion or Disney have already done and put the parking lots at the gates and campgrounds and move people round the sites on park transit.
Above a certain population density (and most European and 1st-world Asian cities with metro area populations > 1 million get there), frequent, ubiquitous, clean public transport can provide the sense of freedom that private car ownership does for American suburbanites. It can also cover its operating costs at the farebox if people want it to (only London does this - in other countries local voters have more power, and trying to cover the operating costs of public transport with farebox revenue in dense cities is about as popular as trying to cover the cost of rural roads with gas taxes would be in Red Tribe America). Urban transport in large cities is a solved problem. (So is rural transport - buy a car!)
The interesting question is why the US is unable to adopt the solution outside New York. Clearly the issue is something to do with crime and anti-social behaviour - if American public transport is as unpleasant as motteposters say it is, then I wouldn't want to ride it. In the unlikely event that public transport in Houston suddenly became as clean and crime-free as public transport in Seoul or Taipei, I would happily bet on people being willing to use it, kicking off a virtuous circle of ridership, investment, and supportive land-use changes until 20-30 years later Houston was one of the world's great transit cities.
The real reason Americans don’t use mass transit is not because it’s full of unwashed, mentally ill criminals being creepy weirdos. It’s because mass transit takes forever to get anywhere, and Americans are impatient and rich.
Why can’t Houston build up its mass transit system to where it’s as efficient as NYC? Partly it’s population density- Houston sprawls more, so you’d need many more stops per person to achieve the same coverage. And of course, no one wants a bus stop in their backyard or adjacent to their business. Rich people want bus stops a few miles from the entrance to their neighborhood, so they can go pick up the maid in five minutes, but not so close that it’s easy for poor people who aren’t employed there to get in. Of course, people rich enough to afford an adequate number of cars but not rich enough to afford a maid want no bus stops near their neighborhoods, and in fact are often opposed to sidewalks between bus stops and their neighborhoods. This isn’t so much due to concerns about serious crime as it is concerns about poor people showing up looking for a handout, and littering while they’re here.
Business owners want bus stops located conveniently in front of someone else’s business, not so much because of crime concerns- people taking the bus are understood as working poor who are unlikely to assault or steal- but because they’re assumed to litter and smoke(cigarettes) while looking like they’re loitering, which turns off paying customers and makes it harder to monitor the security situation.
So you’ve got huge swathes of the city where it’s politically impossible to build bus stops, alongside the city needing more of them. Now let’s add in that Americans who vote are rich and can afford cars, especially in Houston where the working poor who actually need to have convenient bus access to the city have extremely low rates of political participation. Now let’s add in that American cities are notorious for fiscal mismanagement and cost overruns in a way Tokyo and London aren’t, and nearly all of them have massive unfunded liabilities to begin with. Finally, if the city is highly reliant on public transit, it’s going to face negative PR in the event of a mass disaster(and Houston suffers from hurricanes)- either the media will be mad at the city for not letting bus drivers evacuate, or it’ll be mad at the city for canceling bus routes that people in Houston have now come to depend on.
What? Rich people pick up their maids in cars? Is this actually a thing?
From the bus stop, not from section 8.
I know, but still.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And people keep denying it when I claim YIMBY and anti-car pro-densification urbanists are the same people.
More options
Context Copy link
Following on from my previous post, one obvious implication is that self-driving cars are a game-changing technology for cities in the way that trains (enabling commuter suburbs) and cars (enabling sprawl) were. The success of Uber in cities like New York and London suggests that it is the parking problem that stops people driving into dense urban cores, not the traffic problem. What does an optimised-for-actually-existing-people downtown look like where unregulated car use gets you dense urban places linked by bumper-to-bumper queues of slow moving cars that never actually need to park? What does a sprawl suburb look like if every non-residential land use no longer needs a parking lot larger than the building? If the history of the train and the car is anything to go by, it will take 50+ years to get this right and we will make city-ruining mistakes in the interim.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I can prove to you this way walking is bad too.
Surely, you must think walking is great - you can get to where you need to be, using only your feet! But what use the walking is to the toddlers, the disabled, the people who are so old or ill that they cannot walk? Or even someone who just hates to walk? What if it rains or snows outside? You could slip and fall and break your leg! And the medical costs after that would be horrendous!
Also, what about shoes - they are not free to, and in most places it is not safe to walk barefoot! Some people can not afford expensive shoes! And active walking ruins most of them in mere years. What if there's hot and sunny day? You'd need to bring a hat (more expenses!) and a sunscreen and possibly sunglasses, and maybe also a bottle of water, or you risk a heat stroke. It's not a simple business.
And then there are government regulations to consider too. You can't just walk where you want. There are traffic lights, and most of every street is allocated to cars, you can not walk there without the risk of being killed (and fined). You are confined to a small area on the sidelines. Some of them may also be closed for maintenance, etc. And you can not just walk into many buildings, security would yell at you and demand you walk out. And the walkways need to be cleaned and paved, and somebody has to pay for that. It is clear that your imaginary "freedom" of walking is just a naive illusion brought on by ignorance. Those pavements did not pave themselves, and did not maintain or clean themselves. Dense, walkable, urban environments is what the top-down planners created over the past 70 years.
Yes, walking has some benefits. But there are also a real lost of costs.
"Unlimited cosmic
powerfreedom" is the argument of car enthusiasts. Of course all modes of transportation depend on government decisions/can be interfered with by the government. As far as I know, urbanists don't tend to try to pretend otherwise. And yet even with that admission, most of your arguments are just silly. The cost of a car vs the cost of walking? There's no comparison, so I don't know what you're even trying to do. "Lots of space is dedicated to cars and that makes it dangerous to walk" is exactly the argument that urbanists make, and claim that this situation is bad. And this claim:Is just so utterly wrong and backwards. Taking something I said and changing a word so that it's completely wrong doesn't make an argument, it just makes you look like you're trolling.
Compared to utility? There is. How much would you spend to be able to walk 500 miles? How much would you spend to be able to walk with a ton of load?
I've seen a few cities hostile to personal transport, and it didn't make them significantly more friendly to walk. It just made them less convenient to those for whom walking, for one reason or another, is not the preferable mode of transportation.
But is it? I mean, cities certainly existed for thousands of years, but were those "15 minute walkable" cities? Was everything accessible to a person in medieval city within a 15 minute walk? Or did you have, for example, to keep a large, smelly, expensive beasts to get to some places and to bring some things - or pay people that have such to bring yourself and your things places?
The point wasn't to make a good argument. The point was to show the original argument wasn't good.
I'm not doing either of those things on a regular basis, and 500 miles is by definition outside of my metropolitan area and thus irrelevant to the question of city design. I don't really see why it makes sense to spend thousands of dollars a year on a car if the reason to do so is things that I do maybe once per year, but you do you I guess.
Most people did walk, yes. Your average person probably could not afford to take a horse everywhere. But do you think that history jumped straight from the middle ages to 1960? Why not at least try to make the best comparison possible, and look at what cities were like, say, after the invention of trains and street cars?
The statement I made was true, so I don't know why you think making an incorrect statement shows anything.
Are we discussing your personal life, or societal patterns? If the former, then you are the expert and I have nothing to say here. If the latter, then my experience shows a lot of people travel distances that are not easily walkable every single day, multiple times. How long you can walk - not 500 miles, but how about 10 miles, 20? Can you walk it every day, back and forth, day to day, rain or shine? Maybe you can. I wouldn't.
Then don't buy a car and leave it to people that so see it. I, for example, see a lot of sense and so, obviously, do many other people - do you think all people that buy cars are stupid? No, we aren't - we derive a lot of utility from it. Much more than the cost. I am not sure how typical my costs are, so let's see: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-cost-owning-car - this site says the car driven 15k/yr (more than I drive) costs about $10k/year. Would I agree to forgo all the use of my car in exchange for $1000/month? Not likely. Just a simple calculation - if I only use it twice a day (it's likely more) and I only drive to places which can be covered by $20 taxi/Uber ride (also not completely true) I'm already over $1000. And that's not even counting various additional utility.
Did they only walk? Did they walk if they had a choice not to walk?
No, it was not. People lived in non-dense-ubran places long before "past 70 years". And people in cities used horses - a lot. So much that there's a famous example of how people were worried they'd drown in horse manure right before the car was invented. Why do you think they had this worry if they could easily find anything within a 15-minute walk before top-down planners spoiled all the fun? Why they insisted on keeping and using those massive, unwieldy, smelly, voracious and dangerous beasts? Were they all stupid?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, and why AM I paying for these schools when I don't even have any children?
All of those people will have friends, family and other important people in their lives like carers or whatnot who will find it much easier to see them and help them because of owning a car. Everyone knows that the dude with the van is everyone's saviour when it's time to move house. That happens on a smaller scale every day. Driving someone to the store to pick up a TV so they don't have to pay delivery. Driving someone to the doctor or hospital. Rushing over when someone says they need you there right now.
So, you know. Probably a fair bit overall.
I unironically agree so I'm not sure what your argument actually is here.
"If you can't drive, you can at least rely on other people to drive you around" is not what I would call "freedom."
It's more than you would be able to do if nobody could drive. An increase in the number of options you have. Therefore, greater freedom? What, you think the freedom to be able to walk to the store and haul a 40 inch TV back home is of any comfort to someone in their 60s?
How often do most people actually need that much carrying capacity at once? What's the cost of owning a car vs renting one for those specific use cases (or paying for delivery?)
"What if nobody could drive" is a weakman. Being able to drive is an increase in freedom, in this sense. Being required to drive is a reduction in freedom.
More often than you think, if you've ever had to live without access to a car. I wouldn't want to carry anything remotely expensive or breakable on the bus, and I wouldn't be able to carry a week's worth of shopping home from the nearest supermarket while walking -- to say nothing of my ability to bounce around different shops and get my preferred brands of things.
Renting a car and paying for delivery are both absolute ripoffs in my opinion. IKEA, for example, is goddamn atrocious. And food shopping by delivery always runs the risk of nonsense substitutions. The cost would probably equalise faster than you realise, I'm looking at 50 quid a day to rent a car.
And that's only looking at the utility of absolutely needed cases, not taking into account all the things you could suddenly do on a whim once you own one. Visiting my parents costs half as much if I drive as opposed to taking the train. It's faster, I can being back as much crap as I want, and I can choose when I leave and stop for a break when I want. I don't think you can put a price on that kind of thing, but if I had to, it would be high. Driving could cost more than taking the train and I'd still choose to drive because of this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Exit rights is a separate issue, and cars are great in this sense; every household should have one. Indeed, a car is also a great lethal weapon, a storage, a mobile lodging – a necessity for any high-agency individual (it's a shame cars are so easy to break into, though).
As for more mundane applications, in reality it seems like there's no stable position of «walk only»; dense cities with fewer cars and more emphasis on public transport encourage greater access to personal transport, self-powered and human-powered, like bicycles, motorbikes, scooters and such. My favorite lazy way to move around is EUC. 15 mph is enough to vastly exceed the pedestrian range and explore other zones, especially if you hop on and off public transport lines. It's really very neat, the apex of small electric transport: you get free hands, intuitive control, decent speed, virtual independence from roads, and it's the size of a suitcase.
I suppose that for many Americans, not even old ones, such modes of transportation constitute an apparent indignity and, crucially, a serious health risk. Nevertheless, in the limit, the allure of the «European» way where living isn't car-centered is clear. Hauling your 300 pound ass 15 miles to Walmart to pick up 10 gallons of HFCS and other trash in your 1 ton pickup truck is... freedom in some sense, and shouldn't be made inaccessible; but it's also clearly grotesque. There is vastly more indulgence than embrace of freedom to ordinary car use.
It looks extremely risky, and sure, it's far handier to carry around than a 50 lbs bicycle, which does get old after six flight of stairs, but then, a bicycle is somewhat faster and has no microchips in it whose failure means you'll smash your head into the pavement which .. really hurts.
Unforgettable experience, really. EUC wasn't at fault, a white van was.
More options
Context Copy link
What about hauling my 200 pound extremely handsome ass 15 miles to Whole Foods to pick up a selection of organic vegetables and free pasture locally grown sustainably produced eggs? I mean, if anything, my experience shows blue-tribe-coded groceries are available in significantly fewer places than red-tribe-coded ones, so if I'd go to a random grocery store that has to survive solely on a clientele than can walk to it, I'd much sooner find HFCS than organic kale there. Not because they'd hate organic kale, but because HFCS is reliable income and for organic kale to become one, you need a very special populace around which is not present everywhere, especially not in less affluent locations.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I totally agree with this and it’s an under appreciated issue. It basically traps you to wherever the bus/train/subway goes with very few other options. And I think that the ability to pack yourself shit in a pickup truck and leave is something that gives people more power than they appreciate. I’m not stuck beholden to whatever stores are close by, or whatever jobs are on the bus route, or the schools close to my house. If the only grocery store I have reliable access to is the Piggly Wiggly in my “zone” they know they have a mostly captive audience, thus have little reason to keep quality high or prices low. If I can only get jobs along the bus routes or near my home, the employers get a bit of leverage because they might well be the only people employing my skills within that zone. If I’m a specialist, and want to quit but don’t have a car, it’s a bit of friction, and thus the employees aren’t able to get good wages.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link