I think I missed a few responses. I thought he was insulting me. I gotta go now to the tire shop so I’ll have to catch up later. At least we are back to cars.
I’m just calling you out for suggesting people you’ve never met are lazy. If that makes you feel like a victim, I can live with that.
Here, allow me to quote it before you do a dirty delete.
@bing Yes, America is synonymous with automobiles. Growing up as a kid in Europe, the USA was called “The paradise of automobiles”. My town had 2000 inhabitants and there were only a handful of cars, owned by two doctors, a lawyer, dentist and 3 rich merchants. Their cars were a 1948 Chevrolet, another 1948 Chevrolet convertible, A Kaiser Frazer, a Kaiser Manhattan, and a Nash Ambassador, and a few more Chevies. Kaisers were assembled in Rotterdam from kits sent from the US. Chevies were then assembled in Antwerp, Belgium from components shipped from Detroit.
In the rest of the World, the USA with its car culture was the model to aspire to. Australians who already had cars dreamed of owning a large “Yank Tank”
Movies as much as cars were the image of America. The French were particularly jealous because the average French driver could never aspire to drive a large Detroit boat. This led them to badmouth US cars. In most of the world, with some exceptions like Canada, large powerful cars are taxed and legislation into tiny share of the market.
In the Middle East large US 4 door cars are still a favorite and everyone likes the reliable air conditioning. With gas at 7 cents per liter, a big V8 is not going to cramp the family budget.
So, if it is impossible to separate the French from food and fashion, Hollywood movies and cars are the US trade marks and define the country…
Oh boy so much. I never said lazy. You don’t have to be lazy to enjoy sidewalk cafes more than working in a factory. But hard work is rewarding and I suppose contributes to what you consider materialism. I call it more self actualization.
At any rate, the autobahn system was not built before cars, it was built for cars. All throughout Europe there are expressways that were not there before cars. Sidewalks aren’t necessarily everywhere either particularly in the suburban areas. In the suburbs here, sidewalks were often deleted because they were not wanted or needed plus we had to pay extra for those sidewalks in addition to the paying for curb and gutter and the road itself. So why should we pay extra for something that is not used or wanted? Makes no sense, plus it was voted on.
I think you’d find once you got out of the main urban areas, the landscape is much more suited to cars than bikes or pedestrians, even though the towns are closer together, you’d be walking on the shoulder a lot. And be very careful if you are walking in Amsterdam. Get in the way of a bike and you’ll be run over.
Over and out.
I grew up in a very small city, less than 10,000, the closest large city was about 60 miles away. We had a car, but it was not a necessity. Nothing in the ciry limits was more than 2 miles away and the center of the business district was 1/2 mile. The only people who had a need for a car were familys with a husband who worked out of town. Our car went up on blocks in the garage from Halloween til spring. There were two bus lines to the large city and two trains lines to NY City that took different routes.
The grocery store, meat market and greengrocer all delivered after the stores closed and we had a butter and egg man and also a milkman. Mail was delivered twice a day and 3 times on Saturday.
Farmers had cars, but they had done fine with horses and buggies and wagons.
I did not know anyone who had two cars except a very rich man who also had a chauffeur to drive them.
If a parent drove you to school it would have been because you broke your leg and hadn’t mastered crutches yet.
decades ago…
It is illegal for a doctor to reveal the baby’s sex before birth and illegal for anyone to attempt to find out - in India. Chinese could have tried that for better results, and India should definitely have done more to control population (rather than giving hand-outs to parents on a per child basis). Even limiting 1 per pair takes at least a generation just to halve the population, which is in itself too high for the country. Vote centered politics and general laissez faire attitude - it’s all karma, I guess; just not clear whose
When I was living in Israel in 1973/74 I was introduced to Subaru for the first time. Toyota would only sell to Arab countries and Subaru was very brave.
When I was very young, we lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and we were able to walk to the stores that we needed for our daily/weekly shopping. When we needed to go to Manhattan for department store shopping, the subway reliably transported us, after making one train change. My father worked in a different part of Brooklyn, to which he was able to take a bus. Ergo–we had no need for a car.
I do recall an elderly neighbor who would start-up her '47 or '48 Buick Roadmaster once each week, back it a few feet out of the garage, and idle the engine for ~15 minutes “in order to keep the battery charged”, and then it would go back in the garage for another week. She and her husband had apparently bought the car during a period when they had some need for it, but it probably hadn’t been driven more than a couple of miles for… years. I can’t even begin to imagine how much sludge must have been trapped in that engine.
When we moved to another urban area–in NJ–we didn’t actually “need” a car at first, but we soon became part of the car culture, and we acquired a used '55 Plymouth. Later, a car became an absolute necessity for me to commute to work, and now that I live in a rural area, a car is necessary for me to do almost everything.
Unless you lived in a Communist country and had to wait many months to buy one. If that was all you knew about in your world they were the greatest thing since sliced bread.