Transportation companies have always been profitable, be it the railroads of the 19th century, the streetcars of the early 20th, or the construction-automobile-gasoline nexus of the early 21st. The only reason that the automobile is so ridiculously profitable, while every alternative isn’t so much (though bike companies are cleaning up lately) is because our governments, city, state and federal, pump billions upon billions of dollars into road infrastructure while letting the alternatives lapse. If we lived in a world with more perfect competition, where the costs of auto infrastructure were actually paid by drivers (and they aren’t- highways are subsidized to the tune of 50%, local roads upwards of 90%, and parking by unknowable amounts from non-user-fee funds), and where the car wasn’t given a free hand up by favourable government intervention, I suspect we’d see a much more diverse transit system.

Hong Kong’s subway system is entirely privately funded and operated. It is a profitable and for-profit business.

As far as I’m aware, there is no transportation system based on private automobiles anywhere in the world that operates without government intervention, including in Hong Kong. Feel free to prove me wrong.

Cheers,

–Ian

Some are supporting the notion that a grass-roots redesign of often centuries old transportation and personal paradigms is the way to go. Like Jose has three decades for changes like this to titrate down to him? This makes it impossible to rely solely upon future-planing to get Jose to effin work TODAY folks. Next? Ya, we go for the symptom, and not the problem. Imagine that? Yet you guys wonder why you come off as classist. While you would redesign our lives, people are trying to make better lives for themselves. The only one they get.

We should be handing out free cars, but no. Wouldn’t want the elitist Church of Green, and Urban LIvability cadres to go without some poor people to kick around, now would we? We should be scrapping mass-transit wholesale, and recycling it into sustainable-fuel cars. But no. No, we’re going to swallow this false humanism from the Progressive Cali liberals again and move the poor people off the road, and onto buses, so that the Goode Family has an easier time getting to their MTB destinations.

No, no elitism there. Huh-uh.

Wrong! Mobility is a basic human right and most people and creatures have this. It is called self-propulsion. Fortunately, science and technology helps those people who cannot move under their own power in addition to greatly improve the speed and range of the vast majority of people who are born with self-propulsion.

Transportation systems based on cars greatly infringe on this basic human right to the point of being structurally violent; not unlike the structural violence of the poor being denied suitable health care in failing states like the Sudan, Congo, etc., where mortality and suffering is extremely high as if tahe poor are victims of actual violence such as the collapse of the rule of law and war.

It is absurd when automobile advocates try to use this argument.

Here, where we are it is easy to feel a sense of entitlement, to actually believe that we deserve, even actually have earned the riches and high quality of life we have. To a large extent we are just lucky; in the main, to be in the right place at the right time having the right parents.

Certainly there are structural causes – perhaps the most egregious case being ‘Greatest Generation’ city planners eminent-domaining the homes of a quarter million black people, shuttling them to Corbusian projects, disconnecting the projects from transit, and creating a permanent underclass of subsidized rentors who lack equity and who thus can’t reach the bottom rung of the latter to start climbing. They’re trapped there, by design.

Systematic, structural oppression well-understood doesn’t lead you to identity politics. Identity politics are destructive because they teach people to vote for folks “like them”, not folks who’ll benefit them.

It’s especially damaging in America, where our republic pits faction on faction per design; it’s always in the state’s interest to factionalize the people.

As evidence I’ll cite the black political caucus’s failure to improve the material condition of black Americans over the past fifty years. There’s been no progress because black-caucus politicians cannot lose the black vote, no matter what they do. No Republican will ever be rewarded for helping poor urban blacks, and no Democrat will ever lose his primary for _failing_ to help poor urban blacks.

The biggest beneficiaries of politics understood as competing ethnic, social, or economic groups, are the figureheads who in theory represent those groups, because their representation is de-facto permanent by nature.

As for the whole poor failing to achieve, there is some good research connecting lack of nutrition, child abuse, drug use during pregnancy to lack of success in later life. Basically, when one person fails, look to them. When an entire group does, start looking for deeper causes.

‘Mobility is a human right’ isn’t wrong because ‘Americans are too mobile’, it’s wrong because it’s phrased positively, it suggests we have duties to others. Freedom of movement is principle rightly understood, not society somehow owing each soul a mobility guaranty.

The latter turns into Mobility Aid programs for protected groups, with attendant bureaucracies and infantilization. The former means cops can’t ask for your papers.

Certainly restoring walkable neighborhoods will make all of us happy.

If my sympathy for the marooned American poor runs short, it’s only because I’m dry of it completely. There’s nothing deserved or savory about this situation.

Special treatment based on economic status isn’t only distasteful when applied to the rich.

The slogan not only implies that we should try to expend mobility; it also works against our attempts to promote clean transportation.

Because freedom of speech is a basic human right, we must defend it for everyone, including people we disagree with.

Likewise, if mobility is a basic human right, we must defend it for everyone, including those whose mode of transportation we disagree with.

Jarrett Walker talked about access and I have expanded on that a bit.

I think there have to be limits on access too, or else you get people moving to Tristan da Cunha and expecting free transportation to the nearest Trader Joe’s. But access is a lot closer to what we want, and talking about it instead of mobility will allow us to work towards more efficient transportation.

Most Americans are too mobile. Per capita VMT is twice what it was in the 1960s, and we don’t benefit from all this driving back and forth.

The goal should be to reduce the need for mobility – or more precisely, to reduce the need for mobility in motor vehicles. We should be moving back to the old fashioned mobility: moving around on your own power for most trips.

Out on the North Fork of Long Island, agricultural production — which is more and more focused on wine production and crucial to the local economy — would be in dire straits if not for bike-riding laborers. And transit here is too sparse to be an option.

I don’t think that the plight of people who bike because they can’t afford a car adds much support to the cause of livable streets. I reckon that the vast majority of day laborers who ride a bike because they have to are dreaming of the day when they can afford a car and drive to work like everybody else.

Maybe there is something inherently elitist about the realization that the dominant lifestyle of a good chunk of the industrialized world (and the fondest dream of much of the rest of the world) is profoundly misguided and bad for everybody, including those who are lucky enough to live that way.

Children, elderly and disabled are forced to be either be home bound or chauffered around by healthy driving age family members.

Those on the margins are forced to start earlier or continue longer than is probably safe for other road users. The ability to drive IS independence.

We focus a lot on “commuters” but there are many people that need basic mobility that don’t have a job.