this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Cars
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All cars, all the time.
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Load of horseshit. More and more of our electricity is renewables. It grows every year. And EVs DO solve emissions problems. In the US we are NOT getting walkable cities. That ship sailed about 150 years ago.
I gotta call bs chief. My city, notoriously car dependent in the 70s, just removed a lane of traffic on a major local road (leads from business/commercial to a residential area and high school) and put a grade-separated pedestrian only path.
You cannot give up on walkable cities. We can build them; EVs are for the car industry - Yes they do reduce emissions but still reinforce car dependency causing a lovely cocktail of knock effects that encourage decimating our environment, preventing investment from staying local to the community [pop up shops don't stick around in karen fortresses], and actively builds a hostile environment.
Like, yeah we gotta have cars, but don't kid yourself in that scenario preventing walkable cities. Cars are new. Walkable cities are not. If we as a nation invested in 45% of what we do on the highways Amtrak would probably run through every capital once, maybe even twice a day.
But we don't. Because for some reason we as a society simply cannot invest in transit that isn't a half-baked asphalt slap. It just isn't possible. Nope. We'll fuckin die if we do anything other than subsidize car companies that can more than afford investing in themselves because if the stock market does that go up and make a few people more rich the world is falling apart /s
A lot of places just aren't "cities". I live inside the perimeter loop highway of a major US city but I'm in a suburb. There are no sidewalks. No bike lanes. No shoulder on the road, just a ditch and dangerous high speed curves with lots of earth-hauler landscaping trucks. The nearest bus stop is 3 miles away and it runs at most twice a day in the wrong direction for me.
I'm not even talking about rural life. Cars are part of the US for a long time to come. Let's make them as good as we can.
Well, yes. We should make them as good as we can. I just don't feel cars are the only mode we should make as good as we can. Right now, it feels like we're only starting to consider cars may not always need to be the "default".
Going all in on cars is what leads to these kinds of "nothing-towns". It's like they're made for people to drive through, but not necessarily for people to exist in.