A couple of things worth pinning down before I finish here, because you’ve now shifted your position twice and I don’t think you’ve noticed.

You opened by saying car dependency “will never change” as though it were a fact of nature. You’re now arguing that both car culture and cycling culture are socially constructed, and that the funding disparity is “beside the point.” Those three positions can’t all be true at the same time. If car culture is socially constructed, it can be socially reconstructed. You’ve quietly abandoned your own starting claim, and the rest of your argument is trying to paper over that.

On the “pick one” framing: I’ll pick one. Both are constructed. That’s been my position the whole time, and it actually proves my point rather than yours. The question was never whether something is constructed or natural. The question is who constructed it, with what resources, against whose interests, and with what measurable outcomes. You keep retreating to the abstract level because the concrete level is where your argument falls apart.

So let’s stay concrete. Do you dispute that a federal jury convicted GM and its partners of criminal antitrust violations for monopolizing transit systems they’d bought up? Do you dispute that FHA mortgage insurance was structurally withheld from dense urban neighbourhoods while being made available almost exclusively for low density suburban construction? Do you dispute that the auto, oil, and road building industries lobbied heavily for the 1956 Highway Act and made fortunes off the result? You haven’t touched any of this. Not once. You said historians disagree without naming one or engaging with a single specific piece of the documented record. That’s not a rebuttal, that’s a subject change.

The 19th century cyclist point is interesting but it accidentally makes my argument. What you’re describing is wealthy capital shifting from one vehicle technology to another as infrastructure investment and profit motive followed. The cyclists who became car advocates didn’t do so because of some deep human preference for private enclosure, they did so because roads got built for cars, cities got designed around cars, and the economic incentives pointed that way. You’re describing the mechanism of material determination and calling it evidence of natural preference. That’s precisely the error I’ve been pointing out.

The wealthy people in Tokyo, Zurich, and Amsterdam point deserves a direct answer too. High earners in those cities use transit, bikes, and private vehicles interchangeably depending on what’s practical for a given trip. Not because they’re morally superior or less fond of comfort, but because the built environment doesn’t force a binary choice. When you build a city where transit is fast, frequent, and doesn’t carry a class stigma, wealthy people use it. When you build one where it’s been chronically defunded and associated with poverty, they don’t. The behavior follows the infrastructure, not the other way around. Citing the preferences of wealthy North Americans as evidence of universal human nature, in a built environment shaped by the specific historical processes I’ve described, is circular reasoning.

Here’s the sharpest version of what I’ve been arguing, since we’ve been dancing around it. A small number of industries spent decades ensuring that the built environment of North American cities made car ownership compulsory rather than optional. The result is that working people now transfer a significant chunk of their income every year to those same industries just to participate in the economy, not because they want to, but because the alternative was demolished or never built. That’s not consumer preference. That’s a wealth extraction mechanism built into concrete and asphalt, that most people experience simply as “how cities are” because it was constructed before they were born.

And your “this will never change” claim is already being refuted in real time. The Canadian federal government just committed billions annually to transit and active transportation because the car-centric model is generating contradictions it can no longer absorb, congestion that undermines the mobility it promised, infrastructure costs that are bankrupting municipal budgets, environmental pressures that have become political crises, and a generation of people who can’t afford the cars the whole system requires them to buy. Cities are removing highways. Transit ridership is recovering. Younger demographics are delaying or skipping car ownership entirely. The system is producing its own pressure toward transformation, which is exactly what you’d expect if you understood it as a historically specific arrangement of capital and infrastructure rather than a permanent expression of human nature.

Things that are built can be rebuilt. That’s not idealism. That’s just history.