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Michael Magoon's avatar

I don’t think that anti-car urbanism is something that the Progress movement should be associated with. It is actually a Reactionary ideology that wants to go back to an imagined past that never existed.

Automobiles, roads, and highways are vital technologies that enable transportation and long-term economic growth. I have no problem if people want to live in densely populated cities with no cars, but I think the anti-car urbanist movement is really about using government policy to force people to live in those type of neighborhoods. And they will spend enormous amounts of government resources to achieve a goal that only a small number of affluent voters want.

I have not read the studies that you refer to, but my guess is that they do not include the massive positive externalities of long-term economic growth since the 1950s when the American highway system was built. Auto-based transportation obviously played a big role in that growth.

My guess is that those positive externalities would dwarf the negative externalities of amenities mentioned in the study. If one uses the concept of externalities, one must include both the negative and the positive.

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Kevin's avatar

It seems like there are two sorts of urbanists. The “pro-transit” groups are pushing for building new things that work very well with a no-car lifestyle. And the “anti-car” groups push to stop building things or to destroy things that are used by the car lifestyle.

Some of the “anti-car” groups seem more like degrowthers than like progress people. Like that new city in California, many groups opposed it because it would be car centric. That frustrated me - groups calling themselves “yimby”, but opposed to new developments.

My personal hope is that the “true yimby” groups win, both pro-transit and pro-car, and that we can build more of both things so that everyone can have areas they like.

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