
The Social Ideology of the Motorcar (1973) - nvr219
http://unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-motorcar/
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schoen
There's lots of interesting stuff there, and ideas that have become familiar
to people who don't necessarily share the author's overall prescriptions (some
related views were expressed in English in _The Death and Life of Great
American Cities_ by Jane Jacobs, 12 years earlier).

There was one claim here that confused me:

> Unlike the horse rider, the wagon driver, or the cyclist, the motorist was
> going to depend for the fuel supply, as well as for the smallest kind of
> repair, on dealers and specialists in engines, lubrication, and ignition,
> and on the interchangeability of parts. Unlike all previous owners of a
> means of locomotion, the motorist’s relationship to his or her vehicle was
> to be that of user and consumer-and not owner and master. This vehicle, in
> other words, would oblige the owner to consume and use a host of commercial
> services and industrial products that could only be provided by some third
> party.

I wonder if this was different in France, but in the U.S. quite a lot of car
owners have prided themselves on their ability to maintain and repair their
own cars (which has certainly become more difficult over time in a host of
intentional and unintentional ways). It's hard for me to think of American car
owners of earlier decades too easily agreeing that they were "user and
consumer-and not owner and master" of a car.

Also, I thought that there was a fairly considerable period of time in which
bicycle mechanics were commonly the _same people_ as automobile and motorcycle
mechanics. (In fact, there was a brief period of time in which _airplane
mechanics_ were the same people as bicycle mechanics!) They used related parts
which were sometimes manufactured by the same firms and sometimes worked on
the same principles. Even today, the Schraeder valve is used on both
automobile tires and (many) bicycle tires, and cyclists can still fill their
tires at gas stations (although it's not necessarily a good idea).

I've seen some shops in Latin America that are both bicycle and motorcycle
mechanics, although I'm sure the overlap in the specific parts and tools they
use for each has decreased over time. I've also seen a near-continuum between
bicycles, motorized bicycles, mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and cars where
it's quite possible for me to imagine the same person using related skills to
work on any two of these.

There's a trend in almost all of our technology away from ease of repair and
away from user familiarity with repair and maintenance. I'm concerned and sad
about that on a number of levels, but I don't quite understand how the
automobile partakes of a kind of original sin in this respect which the
bicycle doesn't.

(Also, I have a bicycle now that has fancier and harder-to-make-from-scratch
components in _almost every way_ than the first cars did -- frame materials,
tires, brakes, suspension, manufacturing quality of the gears, and probably a
number of other things I'm forgetting. If Henry Ford could have used
comparably good stuff on his cars, it would have been a big improvement.)

Also, to belabor the point a little bit, most horse riders by 1900 or whatever
probably didn't know how to make their own saddles, stirrups, reins, or
horseshoes, and would have been in quite a bit of trouble if they didn't have
an equestrian supply industry to turn to. Or horse breeders to sell them new
horses when their old horses died!

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
> but in the U.S. quite a lot of car owners have prided themselves on their
> ability to maintain and repair their own cars

You're still dependent on _a host of commercial services and industrial
products_ in the form of oils and lubricants, replacement parts such as
windscreen wipers, gaskets, seals, bushes, shock absorbers, tyres. I can't
think, right now, of a single car part I can make by myself. Even if you have
a lathe you're going to need stock material to spin down.

------
Karrot_Kream
> "The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours
> a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This
> includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the
> hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance,
> tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles
> (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one
> hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel
> at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go
> wherever they want and aren’t restricted to asphalt roads."

I'd love to see modern numbers for this.

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temp-dude-87844
This essay observes that the advantages conferred by cars were significantly
dampened once the cityscape evolved to benefit from those advantages. At a
time when cars weren't so widespread, they allowed freedom of movement,
freedom of leisure travel, and a fast, personal commute from a leafy suburb
instead of having to live in crowded cities. But the availability of cars
allowed those suburbs to be worthwhile to develop and many moved (for complex
reasons that include a mix of personal, economic, discretionary, aspirational,
classist, and racist), and many years later enough people have cars in an area
that not having one is a significant hindrance.

When this is observed, some interpret it as a tragedy of the commons. But
while noting a class struggle, it's this socialist essay that accidentally
makes a surprisingly capitalistic point: that much of one's outcomes depends
on comparative advantage, and this advantage can disappear when everyone else
catches up. In parts of the world dominated by the car, living close to one's
work and adjacent to serviceable public transit can become the comparative
advantage in turn. This is a major factor in gentrification and center city
housing prices, as landowners, landlords, and developers are eager to maximize
their earnings on their inelastic holdings while renters are eager to outbid
others until reaching their personal ceiling.

As a society, we've once again externalized the costs of transportation to the
people but at costs significantly higher than before motorization, we've
turned housing into an auction, and we've (accidentally, or perhaps
deliberately) made it significantly more difficult to live a life that's not
dependent on continuous, recurring expenditures to landholders, resource
extractors and processors, and middlemen.

------
opportune
I like the article but this bothered me: "Everyone was going to depend for
their daily needs on a commodity that a single industry held as a monopoly."
Every "single industry" has a monopoly on that industry... it's a tautology.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Not really. In this case the commodity is transportation. What are modes of
transportation? Walking, bikes, trains, buses, and personal automobiles (among
some others). In New York City the automobile industry doesn't have a monopoly
on daily transportation needs, millions of people take the subway every day.
In Amsterdam transportation needs are partly met by people who ride their
bikes a total of 2 million passenger-kilometers on an average day. Similarly,
walking is a bigger share of daily travel needs in pedestrian friendly cities
than it is in many automobile focused cities.

That is an important point, especially in the 20th century, because the common
nature of the automobile naturally leads all automakers towards sharing common
cause on certain big issues (like road building and use; parking availability
and cost; petroleum production, use, and taxation; land use; and so on), many
of which differ strongly from the desires tied to other ways of meeting
transportation needs or of the public at large. "Monopoly" is the wrong term,
but oligopoly is accurate, and equally concerning.

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mberning
This has to be the dumbest argument against the automobile that I have yet
read, and there have been many posted on HN over the years. The idea that the
value and utility of the automobile is diminished because everybody has one is
absurd. I’m sure this argument has some appeal to people living in large,
congested cities, but that is going to be a very small percentage of commuters
in the nation. For the remainder which we seldom hear from they are presumably
quite happy with the freedom and utility a personal automobile provides.

~~~
InclinedPlane
> _" The idea that the value and utility of the automobile is diminished
> because everybody has one is absurd."_

You missed it entirely. The argument is that it is _unreasonable and
unsustainable_ to expect that everybody should own one. We have normalized
many of the costs of near universal automobile ownership today, but in many
ways it is unsustainable, particularly as urbanization increases and
particularly as cities are the main economic drivers in the modern era. We're
killing ourselves with the idea that everybody not only should own a beach
house but has to own a beach house in order to function in society and the
economy, and there just isn't enough beach front property for that to be
realistic.

