High-density population centers are bleak, crowded, expensive, and dangerous. Most people are neither willing nor financially able to live in one, and must therefore commute to work in a >personal vehicle of some kind. Public transportation is intolerably slow in suburban and rural areas.

Furthermore, depriving people of their own means of transportation confines them to the limits of the public transportation system in their area. Freedom of movement is most people’s >only hope of protecting themselves from all manner of tyranny and exploitation, such as the anti-trans and anti-abortion laws now in effect in portions of the United States. Limiting >freedom of movement is dystopian. What good is solving the climate crisis only to replace it with something equally horrible?

okay, i'm gonna infodump here. this is just something i really care about, and i want you to understand why its important. genuinely i don’t even care that much about whatever other point i made here, if you are for using technology to mitigate climate change, being against expanding public transportation can really only come from ignorance of the harms done by car infrastructure in urban environments, or some sort of bias against city dwelling people.

like 80% of all people in the US live in urban areas, at least according to US Census data. you are in the minority if you aren't living in a relatively dense urban population. they can be dirty and expensive (though that isn't an inherent property of urban areas, just a failure of policy), but the thing about them being dangerous, or at least significantly more dangerous than rural areas, is just not factual. there are a number of studies examining the exact conditions, but if you live out in a rural area you're significantly more likely to die from injury according to some sources, and urban population centers tend to have much greater access to medical services. i'm not saying that there aren't specific health risks that come with living in cities, but there is by no means a consensus that urban areas are more substantively more dangerous than rural areas by any metric.

you’re just kinda wrong about this one, people aren’t just willing to live in urban areas, most of them already do. could be a confirmation bias thing if you live rural, but yeah, urbanization has already had its way with us, you are firmly in the minority if you’re rural, and you’ve been a shrinking minority for decades. now, maybe that explains why you don’t see the use in public transit, but for the majority of americans this is an important climate justice and civil rights issue, no matter how much you think we’re all dirty icky city dwellers whose lifelong homes are “bleak” and “dangerous”. i don’t mean to be hostile, just check yourself a little bit. so what if our homes are bad places to live? i mean, i strongly disagree, cities can be awesome especially if you’re queer, but we still live here, and we want a good quality of life too. ignoring that urban areas exist is not a solution to the climate related problems facing urban areas, and public transportation, even as shitty as it can be, is so fucking important to the wellbeing of people across urban america, myself included. as somebody who lives in a city, i’m telling you straight up that any kind of equitable urban living environment needs to have access to robust public transportation, and the harms done by car infrastructure historically and in the present day cannot be overstated. imminent domain fuckery, building highways over marginalized communities, the immense burdens placed on urban working class people by the ownership of cars, it goes on and on and on.

you seem to like conspiracies, so how’s this for one. the state of public transportation in the US is abysmal compared to many other nations, including nations which are far less prosperous than ours supposedly is, and that is more a consequence of lobbying than some inherent positive quality cars have over other modes of transport, especially in dense urban population centers. our current legislation about who can build what where has led to suburban sprawl, vast, “”bleak”” wastelands of energy-sucking McMansions connected by acres upon acres of heat-absorbing asphalt road (i’m joking, kind of), miles from the nearest grocery store, many of which were built specifically for the purposes of generating mortgages leading up to the 2008 financial crisis rather than building houses people actually want to live in. the realities of needing a car in the US are a consequence of laws which prevent us from making infrastructure catered towards walkable communities with plenty of green space, and were implemented with help from lobbyists to make everybody dependent on private corporations selling us expensive vehicles that require fossil fuels, rather than publicly owned, reliable, safer, and faster modes of transport. so many cities had robust networks of electric cable cars and other forms of public transit back before the car was a thing, and in so many places it was fucking gutted, torn out to make way for more cars so the robber barons of the era could make us buy their combustion engines.

for urban living, the material realities of car ownership are miserable, dangerous, slow, and cause significant financial burden. for those reasons, the idea of car ownership as a tool for freedom of movement is kinda laughable to me. what kind of freedom needs a down payment? why should that freedom be in the hands of auto companies? how in the fuck is rush hour traffic, claustrophobic strips of sidewalk, and barren paved over earth freedom? in an equitable society, freedom of movement should be just that, freedom. it should not be locked behind financial barriers, or behind private ownership, and it shouldn’t come at the cost of our public spaces, especially when space is so valuable inside cities. the lack of plants, trees, and the black asphalt paved over every inch of land in many urban areas can increase temperatures alot compared to the surrounding countryside, and that can mean life or death for people, especially as things continue to get hotter. if you live rural, and you have a lot of wildlife around you, you might not experience the indirect costs of building a place for cars instead of people, but it has a massive influence on the quality of life of people in urban areas, especially in historically black and brown urban areas. that isn’t even mentioning the ways in which high density areas are disproportionately impacted by car ownership. when you’re out in a rural area, storing cars is not a big issue, because there is an abundance of land to put cars on. but as the population density gets higher, and people start living in apartments or other closer living arrangements, the management of personal vehicles can get tricky. in highly urbanized regions, owning a car might even be impossible, because unless you have the money to rent out a spot for it, there just isn’t any room. and if that’s all true, and there isn’t good public transport in that area, then people can get stuck in places, especially poor people, and especially people of color.

part of the reason why state level anti-trans and anti-abortion rules will negatively impact so many people when access is just a state away is exactly because the US as it exists currently has a pretty big problem with freedom of movement. especially in impoverished urban areas, many people cannot afford to leave work, cannot afford the price of gas, cannot afford to migrate to another state, and have maybe never even left their city for those reasons and more. federal and local public transportation policy allows everybody to access transportation, rather than just those who are wealthy enough or rural enough to benefit despite the costs imposed by car-centered infrastructure on urban environments.

we currently live in a dystopian state of affairs, and making public transportation better will almost certainly improve the freedom of movement for millions of people who are not afforded the privilege of a privately owned vehicle, alongside reducing the energy costs of transportation and reducing the need for massive parking structures dug under every building, reducing the permeability of the soil so rainwater doesn't seep into the watertable, spreading everything out so everybody is dependent on cars to get around, and leading to traffic, noise pollution, high rates of accidents, and other problems specific to urban environments. not to mention that that many cars driving on roads produces enough heat energy on its own to raise temperatures in cities, and if any of that heat generation makes city dwellers turn on their AC, then the heat will get worse. look up heat islands, its a real phenomenon, and its extremely relevant to how we make the homes of most american people habitable now and into the future. if even a fraction of the space taken up by cars and their roads was allocated for green space and public transit systems, cities would get cooler, and be more robustly protected against the dangers of climate change.

to be clear, i never said anything about making cars illegal, or otherwise preventing the ownership of electric vehicles. they almost certainly will play a role in the transportation solutions of the future, especially in rural areas. but the overabundance of cars in the US and specifically in US urban areas is not a natural state of affairs, was historically shaped by racism and oppression, and must be reformed. its a consequence of deliberate choices influenced by large, highly profitable industry giants, whose aim was and is to make us dependent on their product to go anywhere at all. hostility and distrust of public transportation is in and of itself an aim of car companies and, by extension, the fossil fuel industry that powers their dominance over american transportation infrastructure.