According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, approximately one-third of the nation’s residents don’t have driver’s licenses. In her 2024 book “When Driving is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency,” disability advocate Anna Zivarts argues that not only is America’s car-centric infrastructure harmful to the climate, it also fails to meet the everyday needs of many Americans.
Can we please focus our energy on more clear and present problems like the fascist takeover that’s happening?
In the fuckcars community?
There is a long history of connection between cars manufacturers and fascists, to be fair. But beyond the history involved in them, car centric design contributes to it: Mass resistance is more difficult with physical separation, which driving promotes. Inefficient use of resources promoted by spread out design, and a requirement to buy, fuel, and maintain an expensive vehicle make people in even wealthy societies poorer, and people struggling to maintain a formerly comfortable quality of life are exactly the kind of people that fascists like to recruit, as they can often be convinced to blame scapegoat groups for their struggles and yearn for older times that the fascists can promise a return to.
Im not suggesting the one is entirely to blame for the other, you can certainly have fascists without car dependence, and cars without fascists, but they contribute to the conditions that fascism can take hold in, and make life easier for such regimes once installed.
One of the tests that Strong Towns offers to determine whether your town is a strong one is this: If there was some emergency (say, a fascist takeover) that required the community to gather together, would people know instinctively where to meet? In lots of low-density, car-oriented landscapes, there’s no there there, no community/symbolic spaces where people would go.
Obviously, this is an analytical tool, not guide as to what would happen in any real-world scenario. It does highlight the decline of community, and the fraying of the weak social ties that hold a community together. How do we as Americans organize ourselves to resist when so many of us don’t know even our close neighbors? How do we work to reduce political polarization, which is done by daily, face-to-face interaction with people who are not like us, when we have so little community interaction that’s not through a windshield?
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem as to whether the destruction of community is a cause or effect of car-dependency, but what’s clear is that the fascists are here and taking advantage of the fact that we’ve fucked ourselves over with a car-dependent landscape for too many decades.
@SwingingTheLamp @orbituary So many of the protests taking place now (especially the Tesla ones) are on 5+ lane stroads where most of the passersby seeing the protest are in cars. It’s a dangerous and inefficient way to fight fascism, but what else do people know how to do in Americar? So many suburbanites don’t even know how to get into city centers for a protest unless the city has been gutted to provide endless free parking.
Geography is extremely pertinent. I want for us to ensure our Democratic freedoms before our conveniences.
The problems poor people have been dealing with for decades have to wait because now, YOU have problems, and they’re ever so much more important than the ability of people to function at a basic level. Please, go ahead, fucking solve fascism.
@orbituary @relianceschool You don’t think Americans living in sprawl and spending most of their time driving around alone in ever larger SUVs and monster trucks has something to do with why so many of them turned to fascism?