The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.
> living in dense inner-city areas did not carry the highest depression risks. Rather, after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, the highest risk was among sprawling suburbs
another interesting tack: how long did we have cars before we started talking about a widespread mental health crisis? is there a more parimonious explanation, like a different event that is located closer to it in time? perhaps smartphones or the internet?
Another thing about "this mental health crisis" is that it has been ongoing for many decades before we noticed it and before it was brought to the forefront. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was out and then President Reagan approved the mass closure of asylums. What happened was that massive numbers of citizens had been condemned and committed by their relatives and "put away" in homes, facilities, and institutions, and then Reagan shut 'em all down.
Today, the mentally ill live among us. Either their families care for them, or they live in jails/prisons because they became criminals and were convicted, or they live independently/on the streets. The mentally ill live now in "virtual institutions" where their chains and restraints consist of drugs. The drugs are what keep them connected to their home clinics and their psychiatrists. The drugs keep them coming back for more, month after month, to their pharmacies and clinics. The drugs they are convinced they cannot live without, making them compliant and unsure of what is really going on in their lives.
The non-criminal mentally ill are mostly encouraged to integrate and socialize, to seek employment and try to simulate functional human beings in society. So they live among us and they are causing more noticeable issues when they interact with people possessed of more sanity. The mentally ill are probably less likely to drive or own a vehicle, and more likely to rely on public transit, so you know where to find them.
But the mentally ill who live independently, and live with these "virtual restraints" are likewise living in fragmented neighborhoods that are not walkable and require a lot of effort to overcome the sheer distances that separate them from services and their employers. They're living among immigrants, foreigners, heathens and infidels, and on every corner is a moral trap such as easy alcohol, easy sex, easy gluttony, easy gambling that can ensnare even the sanest city dweller. These traps are, of course, legitimate businesses that cannot be shut down by a mere vice-squad raid.
So "this mental health crisis" in 2026 can perhaps be partly traced to the advent of personal motor vehicles, but I feel there are several causes that have brought it to the forefront.
EDIT: missed your other reply a few mins earlier alluding to smartphones already
The idea is that teen mental health got dramatically worse in the early 2010s at the same time as social media began to become ubiquitous, but this is likely a coincidence. The underlying metrics we're tracking here are self-harm hospitalizations, and concerns about teen self-harm were already growing in the early 2000s. This leads to a bunch of new guidance getting published which increases teen mental health screening, tracks mental health status as a cause of injuries, and forces insurance companies to cover associated costs.
It's one of those situations where our stats about a problem increased as we became better at tracking it. Teen suicidality is actually WAY down over the past ~30 years.
Qualitative data is, of course, much harder to work with than hospitalization numbers, but the data we do have suggests a weak correlation, if any, between phone use and poor mental health— see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30944443/, which suggests phones can explain at most 0.4% of variance in well-being among teens. [1]
It feels like common sense that social media is bad for you, and sure, there's plenty of work to be done in understanding how and why social media can cause harm. But the idea that there's some big crisis just doesn't pan out.
Info drawn from https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-anxious-generation...
[1]: In fairness, Haidt published a response to this article featuring a new, bespoke set of controls for the data. His analysis suggests that the impact of social media use on mental health is nearly twice as large as that of being sexually assaulted and four times larger than hard drug use (which itself has a slightly larger effect size than wearing glasses). Personally, I don't find these conclusions plausible at all. Maybe Haidt's been p-hacking, or maybe the data set is worthless. I couldn't say. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000169182...
Yes, you could say that, though I'm not sure who would actually say that seriously.
You might be only talking about personal cars, but you've got to remember that trucks share the same infrastructure cars use. Modern city wealth wouldn't be possible without engined vehicles driving on roads (maybe if you went really crazy with rail that could be exception). You take away personal cars and either the infrastructure stays or your city wouldn't be possible anymore either.
But even beyond that - personal cars provide a level of freedom and capability to the general population that no other technology can match. Trains suck, buses suck, passenger ships suck, planes are uncomfortable (but otherwise pretty good). Bikes don't work with long distances, multiple people, the infirm, winter (riding in the winter is a great way to get injured, two-wheeled vehicles don't do well with ice), bad weather, if you need to be presentable when you arrive. Oh, and bikes get stolen. Constantly.
To blithely state that nobody could make such a claim seriously is an attitude which actually has a really fitting term: carbrained.
"I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that stone applied to fibrous asphalt is not a fine roofing material"
"I do not know anyone who seriously thinks that 4000kcal/day is healthy in normal circumstances"
"I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that women are incapable of working outside the home"
"I do not know anyone who seriously thinks a bright red suit is appropriate for a funeral"
And on and on and on.
But we both already knew that. So if you're gonna be obtuse and not understand it I'm gonna be obtuse and explain it.
Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).
In the car centric places, a few generations later they become an indelible aspect of nature. It is impossible for most people to imagine society working otherwise. And even when they do, the collective action problems are near insurmountable. The introduction of technology has irreversibly trapped us in a way of thinking we can't escape.
This is exactly the premise of the Amish religion. You must strictly control technology to create the society you want, not the other way around.
Something I recently learned about roads from Stewart Brand's new book "Maintenance" is that the first groups pushing for paved roads were cyclists:
The Good Roads Movement of the late 19th century began as a grass-roots
crusade to improve roads for bicyclists. By the 20th century, it had turned
into a national effort embraced by the automobile industry, railroad tycoons
and presidents.
Anyone who still even has a personal opinion at all pertaining to what the world should look like distinct from swallowing whatever 'the market' has decided to impose on them is worth listening to.
That's the most interesting thing about the situation of technology today. Most technology is banal, what's notable is that apparently now a culture needs to be in possession of 'objective truth' (no such thing exists) to defend what is, by definition, a subjective way of life.
On the other hand, the benefits I get from that public transport are incredible - it's cheap, it's always there, it requires minimal logistics in groups (no trying to figure out who goes in what car and needs to be dropped off where at what time), it works regardless of my level of inebriation (admittedly I've not pushed that one to any sort of extreme yet), it's safe enough for children to travel independently (no dropping them off and picking them up), and it's largely accessible for people with difficulties walking or moving about.
I think a big part of the issue is that people have tried out poor public transport infrastructure and recognised - often correctly - that their car is way better for them. But good public infrastructure can often be far more convenient than cars, it just requires people to be motivated enough to build and finance it. A neighbour of mine didn't notice his car had been towed for a week because he used public transport so much and so rarely touched his car. When he'd parked his car it was fine, but then they needed to block of the street to do some work somewhere, and he didn't notice they'd confiscated all the cars there. That's the sort of effect that good public transport can have - so comfortable that you can forget you even have a car.
In order for someone else to have those benefits, they also need a car.
If as a society, if we could feel the same way about public transit, bike lanes, sidewalks, that you do about your own personal vehicle - we'd be better off.
The psychological effects of this are enormous and under discussed.
There’s no free lunch. Doesn’t matter where you are, more people = more crowds.
Being stuck in traffic is a daily physical reminder of the zero-sum nature of car-dominated societies.
It's not like you're living away from any people - you have 100 other neighbours living on your street!
Cars came in parallel with a lot of change.
Yes, obviously there are many negative externalities to a car-driven culture, but just like we can easily become blind to the diffuse societal costs of a piece of technology, I think a culture of nay-saying makes it very easy to be blind to the diffuse value of a piece of technology too.
Loud stinky cities full of pollution and climate change are obviously horrible.
But we easily take for granted how amazing it is to be able to drive to a mountain and go for a hike, or call an ambulance, or go to a restaurant when it's raining out, or safely travel in a city without risking being assaulted, etc.
Internal combustion engines are amazing and horrible.
Today I find myself in an urban hellscape without owning a vehicle. Nothing is walkable. I am crammed in, thanks to Equal Housing, with immigrants and people of utterly alien races and cultures (I consider myself the minority.) If I expect to find people like me or shop within my demographic, nothing is adjacent and it’s all several miles worth of transportation.
Car culture and forced integration has fragmented every possible family unit that could have been cohesive or collectivist. If I am celebrating a religious or cultural festival, I can count on none of my neighbors sharing that celebration, or in fact raising conflicts on the days most sacred to me.
Anywhere I may choose to walk, or even if I drive, I am trudging through vast empty parking lots of asphalt because of cars. The roads are laid out for cars. A cop told me yesterday I shouldn’t drive my e-scooter at 17mph in the street but on the sidewalk. Every motorist also hates those scooters, whether in motion or properly parked. Every motorist also hates the light rail train and hate for Waymo is fomented by motorist and pedestrian alike.
There is no place I could move to or live that would change this equation in any useful way. I do not hate cars, but I hate what they have done to our lives and our landscape.