cars and society

TRX
September 21, 2011
303:
[quote]Those of you in the USA could tell me if the myth perpetrated by pop- culture that middle class parents often gift their sixteen year old offsprings A FREAKING CAR? I can't believe such mass lunacy - giving a perfectly healthy young'un, completely capable of hiding a bike or walking or taking a bus,[/quote]

What bus?

I got my license and car at 16, in 1976. My siblings all got theirs at 16 as well. We were an ordinary middle-class family.

We'd all had bicycles, but they were only useful for visiting someone in the local neighborhood. Bicycling to any other place - any store, the library, school etc. - involved using the highway for 5 miles or so until you got near the center of town. While technically legal, wasn't a very smart thing to do if you wanted to stay alive, or at least unhospitalized.

About 7 miles away from where we lived was a gas station that also doubled as the bus depot. As I remember, Greyhound made a morning-to-afternoon round trip to the capitol on Tuesdays, and Continental made a round trip on Thursdays.

While growing up we lived in towns in five different states in the USA; most of them were similar to here.

Note we actually lived *in* a town. Many of our friends lived in rural areas where things were a lot further away.

According to the latest US census, more people live in the cities than in the country now. But that still leaves at least 150 million of us where there has never been any other infrastructure than the automobile, nor is there ever likely to be any due to the lower population density. I frequently travel through places that have no cellular coverage, and occasionally through places that have no radio that the car can pick up. Until five years ago - bear in mind I live in one of the larger cities in my state - the only internet access in my area was dialup, and I never saw a throughput of over 14,400 bps.

From my point of view, these are small prices to pay for not having to live in the kind of urban hives some people seem to expect we should want to live in.