this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
674 points (92.6% liked)
Fuck Cars
9817 readers
615 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
People don't drive cars because they think they're efficient in absolute numbers. They drive cars, because cars are way more comfortable and faster than anything else in everyday life.
They're only faster because transit infrastructure is built exclusively for cars at the expense of everyone else, including car drivers. Driving during rush hour sucks, but many people don't have a choice.
Yup. I'd love to ditch my car but it would mean my 20 minute commute would take an hour longer each direction. And this is in (around) Helsinki, Finland, where public transport is really rather good.
The only thing I wish is that we had more accessible and safe single-seat vehicles. I bring 3 empty seats with me to work every day. I would be more than happy to have a cheap, efficient single seat vehicle for commuting if it was safe. I'm not going to ride a motorcycle 25 miles each way every day in the Florida heat and rain. I'm certainly not going to share the road with the maniacs we have here on a motorcycle.
In other words, it isn't that biking or motorcycling or walking or whatever isn't safe, it's that the presence of cars makes everything unsafe (including the cars themselves).
Similarly, bike lanes etc. are car infrastructure, not bike infrastructure, because in the absence of cars cyclists would have no problems using the normal lanes. (Remember that the next time some dipshit complains about spending on bike lanes or cyclists not paying their "fair share.")
Pretty much every argument drivers have against other transportation modes is rooted in projection.
Smart Cars and the like are closer to this, but roads and parking spaces aren’t really designed to take advantage of their comparatively smaller size (eg you can’t drive them side by side down the road).
To be fair, Europe is sort of like this given how small their roads are
Yeah I wish we had a lot more public transit in the USA but a lot of these arguments do not compare convenience in any way. Most of those rail options are in no way more convenient. Especially for long distance. I took a train long distance once; or was almost as bad as flying in terms of schedule. Being able to come and go on my schedule is one of the biggest bonuses of driving.
That said, fuck cars lol
Not to mention how every time you drive a km, you kill a statistical fraction of a person. How do people do that fucking calculus? How many micromorts are you willing to inflict on others just to get some OJ from the store? People DON'T do the fucking calculus, that's how. They just push it from their minds, like they have been conditioned to by the religion of the automobile ever since birth.