How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream | Climate Town

What people said

fayten · 2025-09 · Recommendation

This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure. There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury Well done video essays: Parking minimums [LINK] Noise pollution [LINK] Infrastructure strain [LINK] More on Infrastructure and Sprawl [LINK] Articles: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources. Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI. Some extra historical context is helpful too: [VIDEO] The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read. In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.

Read the original HN comment ↗

otikik · 2022-07 · Recommendation

> America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-centric because cars work very well for our use case Orr it could actually be that they paid for advertisements and politicians just to do that. If you don't want to read about it, here's a video that explains it: [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

fayten · 2022-03 · Recommendation

There are quite a few factors, I'd encourage checking out the following videos by Not Just Bikes and Climate Towns that cover a broad range of city planning and zoning in the US. Strong Towns Play List by Not Just Bikes (This heavily covers city planning issues in the US): [LINK] The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry by Climate Towns (This covers zoning): [LINK] How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream (This covers the auto industries impact on US cities.): [VIDEO] Dutch Cities are Better for the Climate (and my sanity) by Not Just Bikes (Not super relevant to zoning, but it's part 1 of The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry so I figured I'd link it.): [LINK] These are pretty snarky, but fun videos and the authors list their sources. Their video descriptions are worth checking out just to find a ton of reading material on each topic.

Read the original HN comment ↗