Must we end the automobile? I come before the court trying the case of its extinction as someone who has never owned a car—who never even drove one until recently, and then only for a few weeks a year—and has ridden the 6 train daily for most of the past four decades. Nonetheless, the argument for the car, like the argument for homeownership, resides simply in its appeal, an appeal already apparent to the majority of people on the planet. It is not only that the car provides autonomy; it provides privacy. Cars are confession booths, music studios, bedrooms. It is significant that the best song about travelling in cars is called “No Particular Place to Go.” We pay an enormous price for our automotive addiction—in congestion, time wasted, neighborhoods destroyed, emissions pumped out, pleasant streets subordinated to brutal expressways—but telling the addict that the drug isn’t actually pleasurable is a losing game. There is some slight hope in saying that it isn’t healthy, and that the replacement for the drug is about as good. But understanding this emotional infrastructure in favor of cars is vital to imagining their possible replacement.
Did New Yorker change the title? It's now "How to Quit Cars".
Ah, nm. At the bottom:
Bamboozled me too. Thought maybe skybrian was just having a moment of enlightened creativity with their titles. 🤔
Yeah, I went with that because I expected an article titled “How to quit cars” to be pretty one-sided, and it’s not.
I don't have a problem with it. I just thought you came up with it yourself and were being clever. I was going to compliment you on it. :P
From the article: