I totally get the appeal of cars! I’m a gearhead, so I dig engineering, and cars are buckets of interesting engineering; plus, with the except of stop-and-go traffic, they’re often very fun to drive — they can create a flow state where your perceptual skills feel like they’re being gently stressed in the right way.

If the auto industry hadn’t utterly deformed the structure of America — with everything from lobbying to create taxpayer-subsidized free-for-the-driver parking and to derail public transit, cars might have settled into a smaller, minority role in public life, and would have had correspondingly a much smaller impact on life.