https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/31/23579510/car-brain-motornormativity-study-ian-walker
We tend to turn a blind eye to the social ills of driving.
A strong but older example of this is driving crimes. For a while killing someone while driving was just prosecuted as manslaughter (accidental killing), cuz that’s what it is. But juries weren’t convicting very often.
Someone realised that people didn’t like the idea that you could commit manslaughter, a very serious crime, just be driving your car and making a mistake. And so a new crime was created called reckless driving or something similar. It had a similar jail time but different terminology. And it got juries convicting more.
Clearly people have for a long time preferred to not think about just how absurdly violent or dangerous the act of driving is, to the point that killing with a car just didn’t count as a normal killing crime.
this will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction of course.
Ah is that why there seemed to be this thing called Vehicular Manslaughter in American TV shows? I don't know if we have that here in Australia but I always wondered why such a thing existed since surely it was just... manslaughter whether a vehicle was involved or not.
yep! I'm not sure how much it's common knowledge, but I heard it from a lawyer/legal-academic in a non-public forum, so I trust it. It wouldn't be too hard to dig into the history of it though.
I've talked to multiple people who refuse to take an Amtrak to travel because they were delayed one time, but they'll sit in gridlock for an hour each way on the interstate daily without blinking an eye.
They'll sit in that traffic blaring their horn and fantasizing about flying over all the traffic.
What? First of all, Amtrak is often more comparable to air travel as far as alternatives go.
Second, those Amtrak delays are genuinely upwards of 5 hours. I had a trip leaving at 9 pm, and they had me waiting at that seedy train stop until 1am.
Not their fault though, it was Union Pacific's fault.
Tailgating comes to mind. It's not that different than pointing a gun at someone, and people do it constantly.
There are a lot of things people do while driving that are dangerous but very common. Things like driving with the high beam, speeding, tailgating, using a phone while driving etc.
The problem is that enforcing the rules is hard. You would either need a large percentage of the population to be police officers, or to put traffic cameras on every street.
I do find myself caught in that. Particularly if I'm stuck in traffic for no readily apparent reason.
"All I'm saying is 'it better be an accident' and 'somebody better be dead!'"
I wouldn't think that outside being stuck in traffic.
I would love to drive less but it would take me 8X longer to ride a bus to work. I also can't ride my bike due to fear of death by car.
you're forced to drive in a place that's designed to force you to drive
It's not a failure of the alternative modes of transport
You just need to redesign the place
The study seems a little bs.
They ask questions like, should a person smoke in public? And then ask if car fumes are a problem to the public.
Well they are not really comparable, like you don’t need to smoke and you can smoke elsewhere. I literally need to drive to work and can’t just drive through a forest.
They also ask about personal property being left in the street and stolen. People said that if someone leaves their stuff in the street and it’s stolen, then it’s their fault. But when it switched to cars, it was suddenly not their fault.
Well where else can I leave my car? If I leave my iPhone in the street, that’s a bit different.
I’m in the boat of people who wish that we did not need cars, but sadly my city is nowhere close to having a decent public transport.
You can be forced to do something while still being aware of the issues. Your interpretation seems to be: I can't change it therefore it makes sense to mentally ignore it. But being forced to drive while being aware that car fumes are toxic to health aren't mutually exclusive positions.
@vividspecter @M500 It's also important to note that there's a huge difference between a social critique and a personal insult.
The lack of viable transport alternatives is a systemic issue. It's not a personal moral failure.
It is not a personal moral fault to drive where no good alternatives exist.
The solution is not a different personal transport choice. The solution is systemic change to how transport, infrastructure, and planning are delivered.
The survey looks at how people have been socially conditioned to accept the systemic issues.
It involves a lot of blame shifting, and victim blaming.
It involves dropping or changing a number of socially accepted rights and wrongs as soon as a car is involved.
Except that wasn't the question asked:
"People shouldn’t smoke in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe in the cigarette fumes.” Then they were asked to respond to a parallel statement about driving: “People shouldn’t drive in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe in the car fumes.”
All it asks is whether people "shouldn't" do x. If I understand people must do x, I'm not gonna say they "shouldn't" just because I'm aware it has side-effects.
Furthermore, I went through the actual study and honestly the other questions are not any better. I'd say this study proves precisely nothing about car brain.
I don't recall reading comments on any article that mentions study results where there isn't someone doing exactly this. If I'm to believe comments like yours, no legitimate study has ever been reported on
When any study is reported on, suddenly every Internet user is an excellent judge of what constitutes a good study.
Curious, are you a scientist or some other authority on such matters? Seriously want to know.
If you follow your logic to its full conclusion, you're essentially saying
This is not a very useful line of thinking. The existence of dissent over most studies does not mean all the dissent is invalid.
As for your other question, no I'm not a scientist, just a student
I don't follow this. I supposed to pick one or are both opposing views true at once?
What I'm actually saying is that it would be nice, if literally once in life, a study offered a conclusion and that was that. Sometimes it weighs on the soul to think that all information is potentially false and that no source can be trusted.
I am all for questioning data and finding the truth. But as I said, the fact that it's never a thing that everyone can agree on literally anything, is exhausting.
The idea that they must do x is the normativity they're testing. You must drive a car isn't an absolutely true statement, it's an assumption you make based off your experiences, but many people do fine without a car.
Just like the statement a man must date a woman isn't true. It may be true for you who are heterosexual and for everyone you know who is dating but it's not absolutely true. So questions like should a man be able to marry another man may seem wrong to someone who "understands" men can only be romantic with women but that's a false assumption. That normativity and those assumptions then hurt people who live outside those norms.
Sure but that proves nothing beyond that people think it's more necessary to drive through certain areas rather than smoke there. It's not indicative of any special car brain.
Your still viewing things from a motor normative lense with statements like I need to drive to get to work and I need to park my car. This sort of thinking naturalizes things that are actually part of a system that can change if we decide to. We can collectively decide to ban cars and humanity could continue to thrive, there's nothing necessary about cars. They may be personally necessary in the current system, but the system itself isn't, and this is critiquing the system not individual decisions.
The point of critical theory like this is to look at things we take for granted or think are necessary, show that they actually aren't natural or necessary, and expose some of the problems we ignore because we think the problem is required to live.
You have to step outside the system and look at it like you don't come from car centric culture and with the knowledge that it's a choice and not necessary. From that point of view questions like why is it ok to spew toxic fumes in a populated area? Makes sense since you know the system is a societal choice, not just the way things have to be.
With that knowledge you can try and change the system. That doesn't mean never driving, because it may be necessary to live, but driving less and taking public transit when you can and advocating and supporting public transit and biking infrastructure over car infrastructure.
You seem to have no idea that there are places with zero options aside from cars right now. I live in such a place. You criticized the statement "I need to drive my car and I need to park it." I do advocate for better but there are no legitimate qualifiers to that statement. I still need to. Period.
You seemed to have missed the part where I said
They may be personally necessary in the current system, but the system itself isn't necessary, and this is critiquing the system.
You may need to drive because the system forces you to do so to live. But that system that forces you to drive isn't necessary and we can work to change it. If you are working to change that than good. If you dismiss problems with the current system by naturalizing it with unqualified statements like "I need to ..." Then that's a problem, you should instead say "I'm forced to..."
Like if the government is restricting your speech statements like "I need to not criticize the government" makes that seem unchangeable and just the way things are, if you say " I'm forced to not criticize the government" or qualify it with "I need to not criticize the government because it's repressive" then that shows there's nothing natural about it and that some system is preventing you from doing something, not nature. Then you can recognize the system can change and work towards changing the system, instead of accepting it and moving on.
Not if you can't afford to move. And other people would still live there even if you could. So I'm just advocating and it's slowly working.
They also ask about personal property being left in the street and stolen. People said that if someone leaves their stuff in the street and it’s stolen, then it’s their fault. But when it switched to cars, it was suddenly not their fault.
If they'd asked a question about a bike locked up to a bike rack that would probably be more equivalent. I think if they'd asked if you left your car unlocked with the keys in thr ignition then people would say that's your own fault if the car gets stolen too..
I'm doing my part! I just got my February timeline this morning. I'm actually a bit annoyed with it - I'm pretty sure most of my "driving" km here should have been "transit". But how is Google supposed to know if I'm on a bus or in a car?
If you care enough to, you can go through day by day and change the activities at each time.
Tailgating is also really dangerous, but in my country it gets shrugged off. There's a $100 fine for tailgating, for what could knowingly cause a life-changing injury or just death.
today I was on my daily commute, the first 15 minutes are through dense urbanish suburbs and the last 12 minutes are on a highway. Waiting behind a garbage truck and a school bus interacting with the sides of the road.
I thought "I don't belong here... no, my car doesn't belong here. Would be much easier to bike from my house to the parking lot near the highway and drive the rest of the way. Would cut down on time wasted waiting in this congested traffic."