Cars are a classic "tragedy of the commons" due to how much space they take up and the infrastructure they take up. The places where it might've been 'nice to go for a drive' are not that way anymore because they have changed by everyone having a car. The windy country roads without anyone living on them are now filled with people that 'want to live in the country' but ironically do not because everyone wanted that.

Yep. There was once an Ivan Illich (first I'd encountered him!) piece about cars linked on here some years back, which piece claimed that due to the effects of cars on infrastructure and cities they were only generally beneficial early on, when few had them, and later, if you can pay to have a driver (so, on average, they're now only net-beneficial to the rich). This is for city and suburb dwellers, mind you, not rural folks.

He claimed that the sweet spot for actually-liberating transit technology was bicycles.

I ran some conservative numbers and, sure enough, take out the time worked to pay for my car and make some reasonable (but, conservative) guesses about how much closer my house would be to where I need to go if you cut out all the stuff that's only there for cars (really wide margin-zones and medians for highway, huge interchanges, gigantic parking lots far bigger than the building they serve, front lawns generally, et c.) and, despite my living only a medium-distance from the city center and making way above median income for my city... I'm roughly at break-even versus that alternative bikes-mostly world where cars are just for emergencies, deliveries to businesses, and public transit buses & elderly assistance and such, and aren't owned by individuals near the city.

The numbers get worse fast if you live any farther out, or if you make closer to median income. Like, plainly-negative-value from cars being widespread.

"Ivan's Car": https://www.deautovanivan.nl/eng.html

> We think that the car due to its speed saves time. But when you are traveling by car, you not only lose the time it takes to go from A to B. You also have to work many hours to pay your car tax, insurance, maintenance and fuel.

My addendum: Also the capital cost of the car, whether it was bought outright in cash or with a loan.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to add that was with a paid-off car so I didn't even count that. Bike-world would still leave me with more money and the same commute time, worst-reasonable-case. Plus the commute would also be exercise. And that's with personally making well north of 2x median household income for my city. Car-world works out much worse for the vast majority of 'burb-dwellers in my city.

[EDIT] FWIW, I was skeptical, is why I ran the numbers. He's so right, for the average person in (I'd bet) most US cities, that it's not even a close call, it turns out.

> The windy country roads without anyone living on them are now filled with people that 'want to live in the country' but ironically do not because everyone wanted that.

See also: national parks

Yellowstone is essentially a loop. Have busses going each direction every 5 minutes and no more traffic jams.

It's ironic that as a result of previous generations of the USA being so terminally car-pilled, the "scenery" of most American towns/destinations have slowly transformed into bland, ugly parking lots as far as the eye can see.

Of course, the generations that did this will deny they had any hand in it, and suck it up to their children (you know, the ones they raised apparently) are lazy, sheltered (by who I wonder), etc etc.

> Previous generations would just go out for a ride, take the car out on Sunday and and enjoy the scenery. We just don't do that anymore, either because we're more concerned about the environmental effects of driving, or that we just have more interesting things to do.

I'm also an older millennial and like GP have no emotional attachment to cars. I also mildly resent my dependence on them, having traveled in places with fantastic public transport. I find them lonely and isolating.

I agree about the enviromental cost and other forms of entertainment. I think most of the rest can be explained by the combination of novelty + nostalgia for previous generations. Older Boomers caught the upswing out the highway act when there were new roads everywhere and an explosion of innovation in car design. The country wasn't yet totally built to enforce car ownership via sprawl, so I imagine a nice afternoon drive in the country was a thing many people enjoyed and created fond memories around.

Cars are mostly less fun to drive around in, now. They used to be bigger, with nice wide & deep seats, and they had way better visibility. Plus more were convertibles.

Now they're smaller, with thick heavy safety beams providing much worse visibility, and there aren't many convertibles around.

There are exceptions, but they're mostly fun for the driver, not passengers. And they're usually expensive.

Plus, at-home entertainment is far more engaging than it used to be.

You missed the biggest problem of all - traffic. Driving can be quite fun, but sitting in traffic is not. Because "everyone" has a car now, there's traffic everywhere to make LA freeways jealous. Sitting as a passenger in a car that's barely moving isn't the worst - we have infinite distraction boxes to play with, but the driver has no such toy to play with, so they have to make do with podcasts. Which are often quite engaging, but the driver still has to drive.

Driving IS fun. Sitting in a car sucks.

Save the manual transmissions!

I joke mostly, but I'm convinced it's the only thing keeping me engaged while stuck in traffic sometimes.

If it wasn't for that, I'd have been distracted by a squirrel and love tapped something by now. Traffic is boring.

> Cars are mostly less fun to drive around in, now. They used to be bigger, with nice wide & deep seats, and they had way better visibility. Plus more were convertibles.

I am curious if you do not live in the US. The cars here have only gotten bigger... much bigger. Pickups and very large SUVs rule the roads now, with huge lifts and massive footprints.

Many of the most popular large SUVs, such as the Jeep Wrangler or the Ford Bronco, are in fact convertibles as well.

I mean 50s and 60s (and, to some degree, 70s) cars. Modern cars are taller but there were some absolute boats back then, and they weren't uncommon. And they felt huge on the inside. All but the largest of big-ass SUVs don't feel as big as they did, when you're actually in them.

[EDIT] And even with the added height, the view from a truck or SUV sucks compared to those old cars. The only modern car I've been in the comes half-way close is some model or other of Tesla, and even that wasn't terribly close. Modern windows are shorter (they start higher up the door), windshields more-angled (for less actual viewing angle), and pillars have gone from a thin strip to big ol' things that are far thicker, both width and depth. One feels far less closed-in in most old cars than in most modern cars.

I think you're partly talking about the side effects of safety changes. An older car could feel like a "green house" with lots of glass and small frames. The cabin was also less protected, so the volume of empty space inside was closer to the volume of the outer skin of that section of the car. Thin doors, not much between you and the engine compartment firewall, wheel wells, etc.

But I also wonder if you were a kid back then. Everything seemed larger when we were small. I can look at the garage in my parents 50 year old house and realize that cars back then fit in the same spaces as cars now, and were roughly the same footprint as far as worrying about the exact position so that you could still open the door to get in or out of the parked car.

Oh, yeah, it's a combination of safety changes and shape-optimization for fuel efficiency. I didn't say it was bad, just that it's less-pleasant to go on a lazy Sunday drive in a modern car than it was in cars back when taking an aimless drive was a fairly common leisure activity.

I've been in some of those older cars more recently and yeah, they're just big and feel very open—and, anyway, these cars' being common pre-dates my childhood; though, even my sporty late-90s high school sedan felt more open than newer cars, because it was, due to all those safety changes—better visibility, less of a feeling of the car's interior trying to crush in toward you—and it wasn't a spacious-interior car for the time.