The Social Cost of Car Culture
A rant on how car culture reduces the human experience.
The Los Angeles car culture and suburban sprawl makes you void of meaningful human interaction and complacent over urban decay. In the city, the person slowly becomes artificial. They’re not real. A person becomes just a nuisance or an idiot on the road that is keeping you from your destination.
The Human Experience
Since you’re entirely siloed into your vehicle, you don’t have meaningful interactions with people. Only surface level exchanges are ever made. Perhaps you chat about the Dodgers game over your neighbors fence or brag about your child’s honor roll to other moms as you transiently drop them off at soccer practice. But these are just humdrum conversations. You don’t explore a person’s past and learn how that shaped them. You don’t exchange and possibly challenge political views, exchanging drops of empathy as your learn what hurts and excites the other individual. No, instead you’re trapped in dialogs more shallow than a dating app profile.
In dense cities there is more opportunities for these interactions, whether it be it at parks, bars, or coffee shops. But this isn’t to say that every interaction on a NYC subway or a New York park is a three hour expose into a strangers life. Yet, as a commoner of…
