Modern society doesn't overtly stigmatize social interaction, it encourages social isolation at a structural level. Car dependent suburban sprawl is designed to minimize the number of necessary interactions you need to have with strangers to get through your day. As a society we've gone to great lengths to avoid other people. The miracle of modern civilization is that you no longer need to be a part of a community and cultivate a series of interdependent relationships to get through life.

Car dependent suburban sprawl maximizes the time that members of the same family spend together, at the expense of interaction with strangers. Both have their place in different phases of life. Many parents gladly give up interactions with strangers on public transit in exchange for the extra hours with their children that fast personal transport enables.

It’s a terrible place to live alone when young and single, but that’s not what it’s for.

Cars don't save any time. Mass transit, cycling and walking in a city optimized for those modes is just as fast. It's also safer, cheaper, better for mental and physical health, better for the environment, upward economic mobility, and aesthetically nicer. The personal automobile is for signalling status and avoiding poor/black people, which is worth more than all those other things.

No amount of bike lane makes you pedal 60mph. That assertion is clearly absurd. Of course there are tradeoffs other than time, but people aren't evil for valuing it.

To replicate the 25 minute commute times that are completely normal across America's car-centric sprawl into a dense and transit-centric area, one has to live in the most central and premium real estate. Great if you can afford it. Most can’t.

When everyone is going 60 mph, going 60 mph gets you nowhere fast. Going that fast takes up a lot of space. To go that fast in cities we had to rip out the places to go to make room for the means of getting to those places at 60 mph, and for room to store your giant protective metal shell when you're not using it.

We stopped building the sorts of places where you can still get somewhere going at a reasonable speed around the end of WW2, and made it illegal, so it's now very expensive to live in a sensible neighbourhood, there aren't many left. It's a simple supply and demand problem, though not so simple once you attempt to unpack the reasons as to why we have this simple supply and demand problem.

There's a banality to true evil. It's a quirk of human social psychology that when everyone is doing the wrong thing, it stops being the wrong thing. This why rape=bad, and destroying the planet=pretty alright if you ask me.

San Francisco's many single-family-home neighborhoods have all you really need to accomodate car storage: garages instead of living space on the ground floor. Houses still come right up the sidewalk and squeeze wall-to-wall against each other.

Typical American suburbia takes density way lower than that. People here seem to value that separation for reasons above and beyond their parking needs. For example, not hearing the neighbors' footsteps through the ceilings or their TVs and family disputes through the walls. Giving each child their own bedroom. Having room for play and gatherings in the backyard. This suggests that, even without cars, we'd still insist on a pretty low densities. (Since it is homeowners in the center who control land use in the center, the frustrations of outer-ring commuters under such an arrangement don't make a difference).

I'm fortunate that I can afford to live in a high-rise district and commute in reasonable time by train and elevator. But even with so many places a short walk from home, it's a big metro area - there are many more I want to go which are not so close. Without a car, I felt isolated and trapped. It's great to have neighborhood businesses, but you get tired of the monotony after a while.

Agreed. While I get the fear of interacting with strangers, I’ve never gotten more than mild annoyance from someone when I actually do it. I have never felt like I was overstepping bounds—people rarely mind being spoken to with respect, even if they don’t respond and engage.

Camaraderie is harder, and making jokes others don’t like can be stigmatizing. I wonder if one’s culture of informality is just less assumably universal than it has been in the recent past. I also wonder if living in a city can desensitize you to how exhausting it can be to invest in a social interaction with no clear payoff.

This still happens but it can be geography-specific.

Chicago is one of the few big cities that is still relatively open to these types of spontaneous interactions.

London on the other hand is not.

As a current Chicago resident of 2+ years, I agree. Although I always thought this was just a Midwestern thing, as I grew up in Ohio and this was pretty common there as well.

But, still, it seems to be a big enough difference that I could see it easily engendering a lot more loneliness.

Even 10 or 15 years ago - at the time I had a job that was 100% travel time, and found I could generally bootstrap a decent social life in a new town by just going to the nearest cafe and striking up conversations with neighbors.

Nowadays, though, most people are engrossed in some piece of electronics or other, and seem more inclined to regard attempts at socialization as an interruption.

Frequently the phone is being used as a shield. Otherwise people feel that they are looking bored/lonely. A good percentage of the time people will put the phone down if you start talking to them though.

(not that I disagree the phone as shield makes the problem worse).