The Netherlands has 513 cars per 1000 people compared to the US rate of 779. A significant difference, certainly, and it's plausible that there's a threshold effect where a society built around 50% more cars faces unique problems. But this doesn't at all seem consistent with the original idea that automobile technology itself is bad.

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sobjornstad 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Car ownership is not a good proxy for how important cars are to living well in a particular place, when the places you're comparing have completely different design philosophies. If you look at how many trips the average Dutch car owner takes by car vs. how many trips the average American car owner takes by car, I guarantee you there will be a much larger difference.

I'm also not sure that anyone was claiming automobile technology itself was bad, just that in many places at many times it has been used in suboptimal and harmful ways.

	▲	SpicyLemonZest 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I definitely agree that merely having automobiles doesn't require adopting characteristically American urban design philosophy, and that this philosophy isn't very compatible with dense walkable urbanism. But I don't see how to interpret > The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are. other than as a claim we should not have personal automobiles.

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nehal3m 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You might think so, but a flat number comparison doesn't do justice to the vast differences in urban planning. Check out this video, it describes Dutch urban planning pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k