I'm all for mass transit, but the hard fact is that at least in the US when people have an option, they massively opt of cars over mass transit. Furthermore, the costs of the latter, especially subways, are off the wall except for very large metro areas. Not everyone can live in NYC, Lou. And the main mass transit that is seriously usable for smaller cities are buses, which are pretty polluting.
Furthermore, speaking of rural idiocy, what are people living in truly rural areas supposed to do? Bicycles only go so far and so fast. I guess they can go back to riding horses, but that would entail a larger "human footprint" to provide the feed for them (and so it goes... ).
I am afraid that realistically we need that major tech breakthrough on the automobile that will get us off fossil fuels. It doesn't seem that far off.
BTW, with the auto spreading in the rest of the world we may eventually see urban/suburban patterns replicated elsewhere that we see in the US. Barkley Rosser On Wed, 06 May 1998 14:03:42 -0400 Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> wrote:
> >I would also like to call attention to the fact that driving car is very
> >much like factory work in one sense: it forces drivers to pay _constant
> >low-grade attention_ to their machines and surroundings so as not to cause
> >accidents. This need to pay constant low-grade attention is very mentally
> >stressful and yet does not require meaningful intellectual engagement. The
> >same need is imposed upon workers inside factories, so they have to put up
> >with the same kind of stress before, during, and after work hours.
> >
> >Yoshie
> >
>
> This is a tremendous point. Driving to and fro work has always seemed like
> an extension of the work day to me. When I lived in Houston, Boston or
> Kansas City in my Trotskyite heyday, I always had to drive to work and it
> was a major drag. One of the reasons I was anxious to move back to NY was
> so I could use public transportation. When I am on the bus in the morning,
> reading the NY Times, and flirting with women, I feel relatively free. The
> thought of driving to work, as some of my co-workers do, seems horrible.
>
> One of the points made a week or two ago in a David Harvey thread on M-I
> was the contradictions between the long and short term needs of the working
> class. In the short term, it is crucial to keep auto workers employed. They
> have more social power when they are in union jobs in heavy industry. In
> the long term, we have to replace cars.
>
> The whole question of transportation, housing and personal relations get
> intertwined. One of the aims of the Bauhaus school was to create new
> housing structures that would foster greater class and human solidarity.
> One of the failures of contemporary socialism is that we can no longer
> theorize what such solutions might look like today.
>
> I personally am convinced that one of the greatest social ills in America
> is loneliness. You can look at a glossy magazine like New York and see
> hundreds of personal ads. Highly successful yuppies can not make
> connections with the opposite or same-sex. This is related to the
> atomization of the modern urban milieu. Even in the case of people who are
> in long-term relationships, the loneliness can exist, or even be greater.
>
> Louis Proyect
>
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu