Probably not too unpopular here.
Standing waiting for the bus in my city with decent transit and I have 2 trucks rev their engines loudly past me, another one letting just clouds of pollution, watching people driving who aren’t paying attention and several people blowing cutting last second through a light. All in just 3 minutes by a small corner with light traffic.
Made me think how cars are inherently selfish. People don’t want to be around others (the fear aspect), so they drive their own bubble around. In addition to that, some go out of their way to make their cars even worse to people outside of them.
No wonder we can’t move away from them. They are a definition of our own culture
I love my car and I’m not ashamed of it. It’s true, I don’t want to be on a train or in a bus with you (or any other stranger) but I don’t think fear is the right word for that. Sometimes there are people on mass transit who do seem like they might be dangerous, but usually everyone is clearly harmless and it’s still unpleasant for me to be around them.
I used to think this dislike of being physically close to other people was a human universal but apparently it isn’t. The best analogy I can come up with for someone who doesn’t share it is that people are like an annoying noise. The more people there are and the closer they are to me, the louder that noise is. Being in a crowded train or bus is like standing near an ambulance with its siren on. It’s not scary, and it’s not unbearable. I could stand next to that ambulance if I needed to, and sometimes I do. It upsets me, I can deal with being upset, but I’m willing to spend a lot of money (and to pollute the environment) in order to avoid it.
(Even if I always had the entire train or bus to myself, I would still prefer to drive because taking mass transit is usually much slower than driving. But that’s a separate issue…)
And I call that selfish.
I’m going to use the “E” word - entitlement. I feel entitled to live the way that I do, because of how important avoiding physical proximity to strangers is for me. I suspect that you consider me to be selfish because being near strangers isn’t a big deal for you, not because it is but you do it anyway (or because you make some other, equally large sacrifice).
(Plus, I’m a vegetarian so I have the reassurance that compared to me, everyone who eats meat is a monster. Since I’m pretty much a saint already, I can permit myself a little bit of sin…)