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The car is not the future: On the myth of motorized freedom


Pol's website. The Car Is Not the Future: On the Myth of Motorized Freedom

You see something similar in one of the boldest infrastructure experiments of the 20th century: Sweden’s switch from driving on the left to the right, known as Dagen H. On September 3rd, 1967, at precisely 5:00 AM, the entire country changed the side of the road people drove on. That’s one of the main arguments in The Absurd Primacy of the Automobile in American Life, which lays out just how deeply society subsidizes car culture, socializing the harms while privatizing the benefits.Subsidies, tax breaks, and unaccounted externalities keep this illusion affordable. Cities like New York and states like California have recently moved to decriminalize jaywalking, recognizing that the law was never about safety alone but about enforcing car dominance on streets.

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