Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:

just saw two crashes within a minute of each other in opposite directions on the same section of highway. good work out there, folks

eXXon posted:

If you do not drive your neighborhood or region, what form of adult mastery and knowledge are you seeking in its place?

Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:

Big day for wrong way driving too

quote:

...there’s still no feeling quite like the moment when the snarls of traffic and the dense-packed buildings fall away and you enter space that feels unmanaged, unscrutinized, independent and anonymous, with roads leading almost anywhere, north, south and west.

cowboy beepboop posted:

there is a car alarm going off right now and pissing off maybe hundreds of people. very cool that we don't regulate this kind of thing

edit i went out and it's a giant truck, of course.

eXXon posted:

The ideal urban neighborhood is knowable on foot or on a bicycle in the way that more sprawling areas are knowable by car.

Petanque posted:

the whole article is obviously absurd but one thing that stuck out to me was:

like yeah, maybe it could feel great when there aren't other people around... but you spend so little time in that environment? the average american is only going to encounter that maybe once or twice a year when they go on road trip vacation somewhere. your day-to-day life is so dependent on this machine whose only "virtue" is, by the author's own contention, only suited to the rare moments of leisure allowed to you

Ardennes posted:

Cars represent freedom in America because you have no other choice.

lobster shirt posted:

im going to have to drive later today and im gonna go the speed limit the whole time

Electro-Boogie Jack posted:

it's a little silly to call this sentence the absolute paragon of windshield perspective because the entire article is a huge masturbatory ode to windshield perspective, but still, god drat. imagine being so cucked by your car that you can't imagine knowing your own neighborhood without it.

Ardennes posted:

Maybe within our lifetimes there will actually be an indepth study of exactly how abusive car culture is on nearly every front.

eXXon posted:

The experience of driving across America, which my family just recklessly embraced, is an experience of America but, of course, also an experience of driving.

...

Mindful of this backdrop, I spent some of my sparse nondriving hours during our cross-country trip reading Matthew Crawford’s “Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road.” Ill timed by its June 2020 publication, the book is the latest installment in Crawford’s running series of defenses of reality against virtuality, following his unexpected best seller from 2009, “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” and 2015’s “The World Beyond Your Head.”

In this case Crawford is out to defend what he calls “homo moto,” the human being who moves purposively through the world rather than being simply carried through it, who uses a “car or a motorcycle as a kind of prosthetic that amplifies our embodied capacities,” who gains freedom, familiarity and mastery by navigating swiftly through a complex landscape.

Driving, Crawford argues, remains an important “form of organic civic life” and a “realm of interaction that demands the skills of cooperation and improvisation.” Whereas its possible replacements, especially the supposed self-driving utopia, transform democratic agents into isolated passengers moving under algorithmic power, no longer “mentally involved in our own navigation and locomotion,” ruled, scrutinized and passive.

...

Learning to drive as a teenager, even without a full-time vehicle of my own, was a clear demarcation point in the journey out of childhood, a fundamental change in my relationship to the grown-up world. Understanding the places I’ve lived through their roadways, even if I don’t quite have the skill of a London cabby, has always been crucial to feeling at home and responsible, an adult and a citizen embedded in a specific place. Like most people, I have my driving app to screen for traffic and carry me through the unfamiliar, but I always prefer to use it as a map — zooming out to contextualize the route, turning off the peremptory voice — rather than as an A.I. co-pilot.

And however illusory it may be in an age of GPS and ubiquitous surveillance, there’s still no feeling quite like the moment when the snarls of traffic and the dense-packed buildings fall away and you enter space that feels unmanaged, unscrutinized, independent and anonymous, with roads leading almost anywhere, north, south and west.

Certainly there are other ways to attain some of these feelings and experiences. The young adult in the big city might achieve a similar sense of adult transition or escape by mastering a complex subway or a medieval (or Bostonian) tangle of streets. The ideal urban neighborhood is knowable on foot or on a bicycle in the way that more sprawling areas are knowable by car. What I feel driving deep into the country someone else might feel with a backpack at the edge of a national park.

But the scale of America is incredibly well suited to the potential gifts of the automobile. There is a necessary mixing between cities and states and regions that can happen by car and never by any scheme for high-speed railroads, let alone the hapless and costly versions on offer from our existing transportation bureaucracy. The virtues involved in being a good driver — the mix of independence and cooperation, knowledge and responsibility — really are virtues well suited to citizenship in a sprawling and diverse republic. And if driving makes some people distinctly anxious, learning to do it well, or just well enough, is also a tonic for anxiety, an easily available antidote to the sense that the world is pure chaos, beyond anyone’s control.

That anxious, hopeless sense seems particularly widespread among younger Americans, the same group retreating from car culture, refusing or delaying the licenses that their parents and grandparents so eagerly obtained.

As with the decline of childbearing, this refusal is influenced by cost-of-living issues — in this case, the price of gas, the price of new and (under Covidian conditions) older cars, even the rising cost of driver’s ed — and also a vaguer save-the-planet sentiment, a thread of abstemious ecological piety.

But even young nondrivers who feel most financially justified or morally certain about their choices should weigh some of the ideas in Crawford’s book, and the realities of being a citizen of America in all its continental vastness.

If you do not drive your neighborhood or region, what form of adult mastery and knowledge are you seeking in its place? If you do not drive your country’s highways and byways, what path do you have to a nonvirtual experience of the America beyond your class and tribe and bubble?

If you have strong answers to both questions, good. But lacking them, you should give the open road another look.

Clark Nova posted:

love to transcend class boundaries, in my car

Electro-Boogie Jack posted:

you can't beat the incredible freedom of the car. going anywhere you want, getting struck in traffic, not being able to get around any other way, slowing to a crawl because the flipside of drivers getting to do whatever they want is finding out that lots of drivers want to drive with extreme negligence... it rule's. pity the train-taker, the bike-sitter, the foot-user; they know not the freedom of the car

Electro-Boogie Jack posted:

"a-ha, here are the shops; i simply love to drive past them. and here, a restaurant. i greatly desire to visit, but it isn't accommodating of my car, and so i shall not taste of it... mayhaps if they install a drive-thru some day. and over there you shall find somesuch, but it's hard to park there, and so that way i go not. oh, but see here; we've arrived at the crosswalk, which i enter without giving right of way to the car-less wretches who shamble through it. what hope have they of knowing and mastering this place? and here we arrive at the center of it all, the new rome, a shining city on a hill - the gas station, pillar of my community, a place where all gather beneath the personal injury billboards and breath in the fresh air of civilization"

BonHair posted:

If you mean crashing into gated communities I guess?

Smythe posted:

eXXon posted:

Lib and let die posted:

Circle K is gonna start selling weed

Checkmate, Wawa