The advocates of the automobile have been far, far more successful at shaping US society, laws, culture and our physical environment.
I imagine that’s also true in many other nations to a lesser extent.
“Anti-personal mobility advocates” do not exist. Transit advocates exist, and improvements in transit also massively benefit those who need to or prefer to drive.
Motorists hate anything that isn't a car and is in their way. Motorists hate Critical Mass; they hate light rail or streetcars that hog their rights-of-way; they hate pedestrians (especially when pedestrians aren't wearing the right clothes); they hate Lyft, Uber, and Waymo especially; they hate big trucks and they hate Amish people with horse-drawn buggies.
Motorists will establish coalitions to vote against public transit measures in their home towns. They have come out in City Council and other public meetings, to protest and rail, so to speak, to rail against the expansion of light rail into their neighborhoods, because not only do they hate the construction, but they hate the "type of people" that light rail brings, and ultimately they hate the gentrification that comes from a fixed-route project that will ultimately close their shitty exploitive businesses and replace them with more elevated exploitation and richer moguls.
My assertions have nothing to do with “online circles” except here where I am breaking the bad news to y’all.
I don't deny the general idea that motorists in the US tend to have a crab mentality on the road where they want and expect everyone in the road to only be other drivers. I've also been sneered at in various ways in every non car form of transit I've been in.
- People riding them on sidewalks to putting pedestrians in danger
- "Parking" them right in front of someone's gate, blocking the entrance to their house
- Obviously drunk partiers using them in lieu of getting a ride or taking the bus
- Groups of them sitting around half knocked over completely blocking a sidewalk or other pathway meant for cyclists, runners, walkers, and other pedestrians
Fair or not, you're like the kid using a razor scooter at the skate park. Nobody likes you but it doesn't mean they hate everyone at the skate park. They just hate scooter kids.
at least in England, if you use an e-scooter while under the influence of alcohol, that equates to a motoring offence whereby incurring (car) driving licence penalties, driving licence disquaifications (bans), fines, and imprisonment all apply, depending on circumstances and severity. I'm not sure if/why it would be different anywhere else
And any bike lane infrastructure would benefit e-scooters anyway, so riding them in the road at 30mph below the flow of traffic is a sad hill to die on.
This is true for any kind of transformative technology. Marketing and lobbying can only get you so far. If something has enough utility, it will be used regardless of what people say they want.
I think this is somewhat of a chicken and egg problem. Cars' utility is undeniable partially because society has twisted itself thoroughly around The Car being an assumed part of it. This societal change was both pulled (by car customers) and pushed (by car manufacturers).
The idea that cars needed all this infrastructure that other alternatives didn't just doesn't match the reality of the history of the automobile. And yes, we've leaned on those advantages in the century since, which has also created vast areas where a car is necessary to participate in society, but we only did so because the advantages and utility were so undeniable.
- We would have gotten most of the social utility of automobiles, without most of the social negatives, if personal vehicles had mostly never happened.
And implied from that, we should stop having them now.
Given the known ills of society, I think those negatives are pretty uncontroversial. To the point that personal car proponents have some burden to explain why we should keep it up.