I saw a video recently on Cities: Skylines and yes, I do play that game from time to time. It’s a city simulator, like Sim City, only better IMO, but I see a ton of players who desperately want it to be different. They don’t want it to simulate reality, they want it to simulate the liberal wonderland in their heads.

But it doesn’t actually work that way. So let’s talk about it.

First, here’s that video if you’re interested in taking a look. It goes into a lot of talk on walkability and bikeability and modern city planning lib-speak and I’ll be honest, as a content creator, I’m not really a fan of Yumble, but here you go anyhow. Watch or don’t.

I run into a lot of people who get really mad that people actually want to drive cars, not just in the game but in the real world. They want people to live in shoeboxes and walk everywhere, but these are not people who live in the real world. So let me explain.

First off, and you might think this is self-centered of me, but I care about my own time and comfort. If I want to go somewhere, I am going to go on my schedule, not the transit system. That means I’m not going to wait for a train or a metro or even a taxi or an Uber. I’m getting in my car and going and I don’t care if you like that or not. Granted, where I live isn’t set up for mass transit, but even if it was, even if I lived in a cesspool like New York City or San Francisco, I’d never use it because it’s too inconvenient for me.

Because the reality is, mass transit isn’t set up for the way that I live and I’m not changing for anyone. If I go to the grocery store, I’m coming back with 10+ bags of groceries. No mass transit system is set up for that. If I’m going to Home Depot, I’m probably coming back with half a dozen sheets of plywood or something similar. You can’t get on a bus with that. I can hear people now saying that it’s fine to drive for those instances where I’m bringing something back, just don’t use it for the rest of the time.

What rest of the time? That’s really all I do! I mean, going to work, I need a car because I never know if I need to go and get something or talk to someone or take a client to lunch. They’re not  going to wait for a random Uber and neither am I. We’re going to go, we have a schedule to keep and time is money. There will be no mass transit used, period. It’s not like I go far in my day-to-day life. If I was going a couple of hundred miles away, would I take a train? Maybe but probably not because, once I  get wherever I’m going, what do I do then? I still need to get where I’m going and have easy transportation while I’m there. Public transit doesn’t fit my lifestyle and I’m not changing for anyone.

The simple fact is, mass transit just doesn’t work for most people like me and I know more people like me than the micro-house hippie vegan crowd that makes me roll my eyes. I don’t care if you like it. This is me. Deal with it. Yet you continually see people tsk-tsking at those who refuse to be like they are and frankly, I don’t care. When you can find a mode of public transit that doesn’t ask me to give up my way of life, let me know. Until then, take a hike. When you can come up with electric cars that aren’t worse for the environment than just driving a gas car, let me know. Those batteries are horrible and the additional power plants that would be required to charge them all are worse than all the cars we’ve currently got. They don’t like to talk about it, which means they already know how full of crap they are.

This is a rather odd place to go off of a post about a video game, but as I said, far too many people seem to want to take their real-life political aspirations and shove them into a game. That’s not how it works. The game, whether anyone likes it or not, was built around the idea of a traffic simulator. It’s what Colossal Order, the game developer, is known for. They made Cities in Motion, which was, at its heart, a traffic simulator. This is just a much bigger, more complex version. If you don’t like the game, don’t play the game.

Of course, they can’t just deal with reality. Cities are built around vehicles. No city on the planet can exist without them. If the trash doesn’t get picked up, if the ambulances don’t run, if the fire department doesn’t come by, nothing happens. That’s just reality. I don’t  care how much you hate the concept of the modern automobile, it still exists, you still have to deal with it and if you don’t like that fact, too bad. Time to grow up and deal with the real world.

Wouldn’t that be nice?