Thank you California

Our willingness as a society to tolerate the expense, danger, and health issues brought by extensive car use will be looked back on with bewilderment. You can start to see the insanity when a 'classic' car drives by. It's noisy, heavy, dangerous, and smelly. It's allowed to noticeably pollute any area it passes through. We've made progress, but that level of noise, danger, and pollution is how every car on your street used to be.

Car culture has a unique flavor of regressive entitlement. Every bit of societal and legislative progress that has made cars cleaner and safer has been fought tooth and nail by this group.

Our government created a vast, expensive, open to use resource in roads and infrastructure, offers minimal restrictions an licensing for its use, barely enforces existing safety laws, and the combustion crowd shows outrage at the loss of their illegal activities.

I wish our culture was less tolerant of this behavior. It is a tiny percentage that costs the rest of us constantly. Sometimes its a motorcycle club, others it just rich people shucking the social contract. I'm looking forward to the last Harley getting recycled.

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hydrogen7800 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Car culture has a unique flavor of regressive entitlement. Every bit of societal and legislative progress that has made cars cleaner and safer has been fought tooth and nail by this group.

I'm a newcomer to this hobby, and am amazed how this resentment has perpetuated since their muscle cars were neutered in the 70's by emissions regulations. The resentment has transferred to subsequent generations who were not alive then, who still complain about all the emissions and efficiency efforts that carmakers undertake. Too much unnecessary machismo hanging around.

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linksnapzz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You might be young enough to not remember how much engine performance turned to suck after about '74, and stayed that way for 15 years. Those '70s changes were worthwhile, but the 90-10 rule absolutely applies here.

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hydrogen7800 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I am too young to have lived it, but I have read about the Malaise era. To me, it's just when American car manufacturers had to start competing globally, and couldn't, so kept making the same giant V8's, but with 160 hp.

	▲	linksnapzz 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		More wouldn't than couldn't. The management was mostly of the opinion that gas prices would come down eventually, so there was little interest initially in making anything more efficient. Also, since small, efficient, cheap cars had miniscule or negative margins, there was a belief that competing in that market was optional.

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soperj 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Still is pretty pollutant. You just don't see the brake and wheel dust as much as the fumes coming out of the car dusting everything with lead like they used to.

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linksnapzz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am not overfond of Harley noise; and I understand that some people really object to the VOC-smell of poorly-tuned carburetors...but this is a bit much.

There's artistic merit in historic industrial design & engineering, and keeping those things in an operational state; for which I am willing to tolerate the occasional puff of blue smoke.

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cowlevel 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is California making itself less car dependent or is it just taxing cars while remaining car dependent?

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