The car has deteriorated conditions for those without it and outside it, whether through risks to pedestrians, or through pollution, urban highways, or infrastructure and design based on the assumption that “visitor” and “customer” necessarily mean “motorist.” It is frequently dirty, dangerous, and simply unpleasant to meaningfully get around without a car in most of America today. The broken or missing sidewalks, the uncrossable expressways, the gutted cities, the strip malls that border housing developments but cannot be walked to, the unsheltered stops where a bus may stop once an hour, the thousands of grisly, violent cyclist and pedestrian deaths… 

Who chose this? Did the residents of the urban blocks leveled for commuter expressways choose it? The carless families living in the only housing they can afford, semi-stranded by a landscape that never assumed they would exist?

Was the car a fantastic innovation that merely happened to have some unfortunate and avoidable side effects?