Life is a lot easier these days, thanks in no small part to advances in cars. As an American, cars are a central feature of your life. I feel like a large part of my “character building” years was spent struggling with unreliable, old, leaky, carbureted cars. All the energies I spent keeping that thing running could have better spent working or socializing. And yet I have a deep appreciation for what it takes to make a car go and keep it going.
I may take a century to realized it, but I think you are right. Historians will look back and see America's car-centric culture as its height of extreme decadence and the pivotal point to its eventual decline. When you think about the trucks and SUVs that people drive around everywhere, the entire infrastructure dedicated to it, the health outcomes, etc.
I disagree. Cars are freedom. Freedom has upsides as well as downsides. Technological advances will continue to reduce the downsides, but the upsides are genuine and should not be thrown away. There's a reason why electric cars are a thing, as opposed to Americans just giving up cars and everyone using public transportation.
America should not give entirely up on cars, but reduce to a more balanced level where cars are not a necessity to live. Americans engineered many places to be car dependent when it didn't have to. Once something changes from a nice to have to a requirement, it becomes more like a drug, and the freedom is lost.
> Americans engineered many places to be car dependent when it didn't have to.
No, Americans responded to the preference of many of us for more freedom and less crowded places to live, by producing them. You don't get to decide for other people what a proper "balance" is or for whom cars are a "necessity".
That is my point. Civic leaders DID decide how Americans would live for the next few generations. It is hard to undo even if our children want to go back to the traditional village which had worked for centuries.
Since we live in a somewhat closed ecosystem, you're exchanging freedom now with freedom later with the costs we will pay from the excesses of material luxury. Until we open up the ecosystem, ie, get off earth or really learn to decrease waste, this "freedom" you speak will eventually come around to imprison us if we're not careful.
Technological advances have been steadily decreasing the material costs, not just of cars, but of all forms of freedom. I see no reason why that will not continue to happen in the future. The car I drive today gets about twice the gas mileage of the family car my parents had when I was a teenager, even though it has significantly better performance in every respect; it also weighs about half as much and many of the materials it is made out of can be recycled in ways the materials that old family car was made out of couldn't.
For an even better example, the computer I am typing this on has orders of magnitude more processing power, memory, and storage space for significantly less power consumption than the one I had when I was a student many years ago. It also weighs about half as much and is made of more recyclable materials (and yes, I make use of that: there is a computer recycling center in my town where I take old computers).
