Lol, the “individual freedom” is just the packaging for how they pitch it to workers.
The real beneficiaries of car-centric infrastructure are the employers, who get to purchase cheap land in the middle of nowhere and demand workers be able to get there as quick as physically possible with zero to little notice.
From that lens, of course American kids take the bus to school. Anything that would take adults away from their jobs for an extra minute is unacceptable.
I’m just passing by to marvel at how somebody on good old car-hating Lemmy managed to pull off the mental gymnastics to arrive at the conclusion “mass transportation (a bus) is bad now.”
Let’s not forget that having the means to pull in students from a disparate area was key in finally being able to desegregate schools, literally to the extent that motherfuckers to this very day use “busing” as a euphemism for, “We’re mad about there being black kids in our kids’ school.”
We should be able to talk about how one dynamic of a society impacts another, without having to extend that to a universal moral claim about whether an inanimate object aligns with the forces of good or evil.
Employers like that parents are able to come into the office early and not have to schedule their work day around school transportation
Employers have much more power than labor does, in deciding how the US operates
Therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising that even in a culture that otherwise prefers cars to an unreasonable degree (and, as you mentioned, has a tinge of racial stigma around school buses), we nonetheless think of buses as the default mode of school transportation
The thing is, Australia is only slightly better as regards motornormativity and individualism. But the American concept of school buses is rather foreign to us. Most kids are either driven to school or take the same public transport that everyone else uses.
Lol, the “individual freedom” is just the packaging for how they pitch it to workers.
The real beneficiaries of car-centric infrastructure are the employers, who get to purchase cheap land in the middle of nowhere and demand workers be able to get there as quick as physically possible with zero to little notice.
From that lens, of course American kids take the bus to school. Anything that would take adults away from their jobs for an extra minute is unacceptable.
I’m just passing by to marvel at how somebody on good old car-hating Lemmy managed to pull off the mental gymnastics to arrive at the conclusion “mass transportation (a bus) is bad now.”
Let’s not forget that having the means to pull in students from a disparate area was key in finally being able to desegregate schools, literally to the extent that motherfuckers to this very day use “busing” as a euphemism for, “We’re mad about there being black kids in our kids’ school.”
When did I say mass transportation is bad?
We should be able to talk about how one dynamic of a society impacts another, without having to extend that to a universal moral claim about whether an inanimate object aligns with the forces of good or evil.
The thing is, Australia is only slightly better as regards motornormativity and individualism. But the American concept of school buses is rather foreign to us. Most kids are either driven to school or take the same public transport that everyone else uses.
A lot are driven to school, but our public transit is a literal joke.