Tell me about the road rage (if you want) I hate roads, their maintenance (in some cases their lack thereof), forced need for them if you want to go/work anywhere, cars, certain jackasses driving them, gas, oil, the disgusting disregard and destruction of nature

Okay so I don’t have the spoons to go digging for links and such rn but basically Henry Ford is personally to blame for highways and making America’s cities auto-mobile based. He was part of this thing (along with General Motors and some other Large companies) called the Highway Lobby.

And what the they did (TLDR version) was tell Congress that instead of supporting public transit, they should instead build highways and charge a tax on gas, tires, etc. They said those taxes would pay to build and maintain roads (spoiler: it didn’t and still doesn’t). At the time you also often needed to pay a toll to drive on roads. The publicly funded roads however would not have to paid for with a toll.

Guess what they called these new publicly paid for roads to garner support? Freeways because you didn’t have to pay a toll for them. And people love free stuff.

And so the government was convinced they would actually Save money through taxes by prioritizing personal vehicles and they definitely had the public’s support.

So that’s what happened. And in the process they used roads to destroy BIPOC communities and drive wedges between the nice “white” areas and the “dirty” BIPOC areas. Like if you ever noticed a highway (or even railway sometimes) separating a suburbia/gated community from a run down apartment complex or something then please know that was an intentional choice made.

Auto-mobile corps like Ford also lobbied for local regions/governments to spread things further apart (like schools and grocery stores) so that cars would be more necessary to travel. They didn’t do this as huge corporations but when dealerships were starting to pop up in towns and cities that was a negotiating point for them. That future city planning had to be made with auto-dealerships in mind. And with how much money local governments would get from them, they listened.

[…]“There was an immense amount of funding that would go to local governments for building freeways, but they had little to no influence over where they’d go,” says Joseph DiMento, a law professor who co-wrote Changing Lanes: Visions and Histories of Urban Freeways. “There was also a racially motivated desire to eliminate what people called ‘urban blight.’ The funds were seen as a way to fix the urban core by replacing blight with freeways.”

[…]“Many neighborhoods, predominantly black, were wiped out and turned into surface parking and highways,” Norton says, noting Black Bottom and Paradise Valley in Detroit, historical neighborhoods that were torn down to make way for I-375.

[…]The new freeways also isolated many other neighborhoods, ushering in their demise. Combined with federal housing bills that paid developers to tear down existing housing stock and replace it with high-rises, they resulted in the continued decimation of huge swaths of many cities.

Src

And basically roads are the fucking devil that mostly just exist just to make life difficult and intentionally destroy strong communities

Constant roadwork is an intentional choice. Traffic congestion. Maintenance. All of it. It’s all a money grab. And they’re ugly and awful and along with communities they destroy native biomes and ecosystems carelessly. They’re anti-life god fucking dammit and I stand by that.

I hate them so fucking much. We literally don’t need roads and we CERTAINLY don’t need as many as we have. If ANYTHING the constant upkeep and new roads are a sign of how INCREDIBLY inefficient they are. And FOR WHAT. I hate them.

I hate them I hate them I hate them

AND AND

Side tangent that’s kinda related but roads also made it a lot easier for GIANT cities to exist and get bigger. And I also HATE HUGE CITIES. I HATE TNEM SO MUCH. I even consider it ongoing colonization.

Cuz have y'all ever looked at Google maps satellite view and found a city that was in the middle of nowhere? And the area surrounding it was dry? But the city itself is a green patch, maybe the only one for a hundred miles?

Yeah.

Roads made it easier for huge swaths of people to travel and live in one area. Which means they need more resources. Often meaning they have to suck local resources dry and you can visually SEE that. And how many animals and indigenous ecosystems get destroyed so that humans could live there MUCH outside the means than the area had the resources has to offer?

How many of y'all know of any measures your city is taking to be more eco-friendly SPECIFICALLY to the area surrounding you? How many of y'all live somewhere where food, oil, etc has to be shipped or driven to your area? How many of y'all live in an area where animals and such feel forced to go food hunting in your city?

Yeah

YEAH