Your first paragraph strikes me as disingenuous. Curious, where do you live and how much driving do you do? For most people I know and have grown up around, cars indisputably are freedom. The bureaucratic and law enforcement pieces are such minor nuisances, I don't know anyone that ever complains about them. The true frustrations of car ownership, that crop up on a daily basis, are traffic and parking (and, less frequently, maintenance).
With a car, I can easily drive out of my city and into a spot of wilderness of my choosing, whenever I want. It is freedom in the sense it greatly increases the number of places you can feasibly travel to and the the control you have over how and when you travel there.
Regarding the manufactured human-scale areas, that is the New Urbanism the author mentions. It's a positive trend but the problem is that the city as a whole is still automobile-scale, just peppered with tiny oases, which seems a kind of inelegant shoehorned solution. That you describe them as "manufactured" speaks to that, I think.
>For most people I know and have grown up around, cars indisputably are freedom. The bureaucratic and law enforcement pieces are such minor nuisances, I don't know anyone that ever complains about them.
This says a lot about the people you know, but very little about the subject.
edit: For most people I know and have grown up around, cars are seen as a burden. I was born in a major city, am pushing 40, have lived in a dozen cities, and currently live in the major city I was born in. I have never bothered to get a drivers' license, and have multiple friends and family my age who have just gotten their first car within the past five years, or have given up their cars after moving back into the city from smaller and/or more depressed and/or more conservative towns. I've been dabbling in motorscooters for the past 5 years.
Well that is why I asked about his driving situation, to better understand where he was coming from. And my anecdote was clearly presented as such, I never said it should be true for everyone.
I did suspect that he lived in a major city with ample public transportation. Obviously the advantages of owning a car in that situation are greatly diminished. The primary reason that NYC is at the top of my list of places to move is that I could get rid of my car there. When I'm there I actually get the same feeling of freedom and empowerment that a car affords me in other places.
I was taking it as some sort of justification for calling his first paragraph "disingenuous"; I was trying to understand how a description of the people that you grew up with could make his argument appear insincere or deceptive.
I think he was using "freedom" with the definition of Liberty with a capital L . Or Freedom with a capital F. Both used by Libertarians, where the interaction with the state, police etc is opposed.
"Freedom" with a car is more commonly used to refer to the feeling of liberation. You are both correct.
With a car, I can easily drive out of my city and into a spot of wilderness of my choosing, whenever I want. It is freedom in the sense it greatly increases the number of places you can feasibly travel to and the the control you have over how and when you travel there.
Regarding the manufactured human-scale areas, that is the New Urbanism the author mentions. It's a positive trend but the problem is that the city as a whole is still automobile-scale, just peppered with tiny oases, which seems a kind of inelegant shoehorned solution. That you describe them as "manufactured" speaks to that, I think.