this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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I wouldn't be so pessimistic. The Netherlands was also a car dependent place that bulldozed neighbourhoods for highways a few dozen years ago and look at where they are now. Change can happen, it just needs a critical mass of supporters and time, lots of time.
Us Americans just elected a fascist, who won the popular vote, who wants to do the exact opposite of a massive infrastructure rework, he and his sycophants want to cut every kind of government funding for social and government services of all kinds, keep 'joking' about invading Mexico, annexing Canada, buying Greenland.
We do not have a mass of supporters who are effective at applying pressure on the government... because we now, even more obviously, live in a naked oligarchy that controls the government and mass media... our democracy is broken, our representatives are purchased, our population heavily subject to anti intellectual right wing propoganda funded by oligarchs.
We also do not have lots and lots of time.
Many states in the US are currently seeing home insurance companies either dramatically raising rates or just leaving: The climate catastrophe driven collapse of many areas has begun, and it will only get worse without a massive coordinated government directed response... which goes dorectly against the ideology of most of our oligarchs and most of our people who believe what those oligarchs tell them to via the media they own.
We will not have the money to build out better transit infrastructure ... that will all be spent responding to more and more intense natural disasters and internal migrants.
At the federal level, yes. There's lots of things going wrong in the "greatest" country on earth. That doesn't mean you should stick the head in the sand and ignore advocating for incremental improvements. If no sensible transport advocate actually does anything for it because they think there isn't enough public support, you'll never achieve that goal, no matter how many advocates there actually are.
Not just bikes recently released a video which touches on this topic with some more differentiated discussion:
https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-these-two-cities-used-to-be-the-same
https://youtu.be/4uqbsueNvag