Ill-health, loneliness, road deaths, pollution, ultra-expensive infrastructure: if 'technological progress' is the city designed around the car, I want none of it.
Technological progress is the ability to go where you want, when you want, even if it's 2AM, without having to worry about catching something or being stabbed on a train, and all of your things are with you when you get there. If you don't find a way to provide that benefit, you will never upend the car.
People regularly getting stabbed in trains doesn't feel like a technological problem.
Seems like there are two attractors in the mass transit space:
Attractor 1: The mass transit is safe and clean. Everyone uses it, because it is convenient. Because everyone uses it, people care about keeping it safe, clean, and convenient.
Attractor 2: The mass transit is dirty and dangerous. Only poor people use it, because they have no other choice; all middle-class people use cars. Because no one important uses mass transit, no one really cares about making it less dirty and less dangerous.
From what I heard, the former attractor seems more frequent in Europe, the latter in USA.
There are also other things involved in the attractors, such as width of roads, sizes of blocks, whether sidewalks exist or not, etc. These would be even more resistant to change.
I'm not that interested in 'upending' the car, in the sense of getting rid of it, but creating much more balanced systems and urban design as seen in countries like the Netherlands - where you have the choice of multiple ways to achieve every goal, and where you don't have to drive to have a safe commute. The city designed around the car is just poor urban design for any goal other than the convenience of the car.
