I love living in a car free city. I can't believe America doesn't build more cities like mine.
Fuck Cars
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
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Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
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No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
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Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
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No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
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No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
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No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
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No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
What city?
san francisco
Exactly, no one drives in New York City also, who wanna drive in that traffic?
Huh, weird that when I was there, there were literally thousands of cars. Probably just hallucinated it
That’s not really what car free means.
For years I've somehow missed this. Cars driving on nearly every street and somehow that "car-free", yeah makes perfect sense.
I think it's because the bar is so low, just the ability to choose to walk for everyday commuting, errands, and leisure qualifies as car free. Ie, you can choose to be car free if you want.
I feel like this is people about most things. Most people aren't very imaginative.
They're kind of stupidly in favor of how things are, but once it changes they're like this is great I don't know why we didn't do it before.
Like imagine if free public libraries didn't exist and someone tried to create them. Conservatives would shit their pants hating it.
I'm living a car-free lifestyle, despite holding a license to drive. It's more freedom than I've ever had.
I sometimes make the mistake of driving to college because it's faster. I'm always way less happy and focused (and sad cause of having to pay for parking). Ebikes are the shit. It's about 15 minutes driving and a 25-30 minute bike ride.
"What seems to work best is a carrot-and-stick approach—creating positive reasons to take a bus or to cycle rather than just making driving harder."
I guess this is why we shouldn't only play the "fuck cars" tune but also include melodies like "we love to bike" and "public transport is fun" 😉
I imagine bikes will be very useful in making US cities walkable. The streets have been built very wide to make space for cars, which would make walking more tedious, but bikes are the perfect solution to this bc they let you cover more (flat) distance with just the power of your legs.
Every two lane road has enough space for four lanes of bicycles (one passing lane for ebikes and one lane for normal bikes going in each direction)
As French :
Amsterdam my love.
Almost no cars at all,
Pure joint, with no tobacco,
No noise,
Removing cars from urban areas means lower carbon emissions, less air pollution, and fewer road traffic accidents
Not to mention how much quieter it is.
Why would anyone hate that? To me it sounds like a utopia. I just had to buy new tires for my car @#$%*!
Boomers. I was blown away when I went to a city hall meeting about expanding the roads and hearing their hot takes.
After the wave of old boomers (most of the audience) complained about how dangerous the whole world has become that they can't even take their trash out on the street, they say a walkable city just opens up "more danger".
To them, walkable streets means seeing more diversity, which is apparently super scary.
It makes perfect sense when you understand modern city design as a form of mostly unconscious but purposeful violence, that pretty much defines the middle class Boomer generation in wealthy rich countries. Structural violence… as far as the eye can see!
US Boomers love that shit, the prison system, healthcare, highway design, the tax filing system the list just goes on and on.
I really wish my parents generation could have just been skipped and instead I had parents from the previous generation who actually fought for something and understood how to defend workers rights.
Is there a FAQ about living in car free cities? For example, how do you travel to another city? What do you do if the city has high slopes making walking and biking too hard? Or how do elders deal with what other citizens would take for granted in terms of mobility?
how do you travel to another city?
Usually by bus or train.
What do you do if the city has high slopes making walking and biking too hard?
Walking is good for you, biking is not too popular in cities with slopes, but electic bikes are changing that.
Or how do elders deal with what other citizens would take for granted in terms of mobility?
There is definitely less mobility, but that is part of getting older isn't it? Usually they just walk a bit slower and use busses and taxies.
Or how do elders deal with what other citizens would take for granted in terms of mobility?
Electric mobility scooters as well. I'm sure those are capable of much better range now, and it should keep getting better, and everything they need would ideally be close by
Wouldn't the elderly be a huge benefiter of a car free city? You get old enough or frail enough that you can't drive. Then what?
I like in a city that provides free busses and trains to those aged 65+ if they ride in off peak hours, and it's heavily used. This is in a city designed around cars.
Also "car free" doesn't have to mean literally zero cars allowed, but just build and layout the city so you never have to use one for daily errands.
I live next to a grocery store and it's literally the best thing ever, grocery trips take 10 minutes max, I only end up using the car on weekends for hobbies or to visit family and friends.
For example, how do you travel to another city?
Train or car. Car free mostly refers to inner city trips, for special occasions it's totally fine to use a car (e.g. moving, buying something big, a weekend trip, etc)
What do you do if the city has high slopes making walking and biking too hard?
Bus, ebikes, other types of electric assist stuff, walking. Crazy steep slopes do put a limit on exclusively human powered mobility (i.e. walking and cycling), but those places are incredibly rare.
Or how do elders deal with what other citizens would take for granted in terms of mobility?
A walkable city features amenities close by, plenty of benches to rest, and a solid bus system. There are absolutely no issues for people with restricted mobility. This applies to people with disabilities as well btw.
In fact I would turn that question around: how do elders deal with the requirement to drive a car to get groceries, etc? Isn't that like super duper dangerous?
I love living car free with my needs in walking/biking distance. However I feel like the car centric problem runs deeper than basic groceries and transit to work. I live near the gorgeous rocky mountains, but our buses only really run to the ski slopes, and only in winter. It's a true shame to be so close to nature and have my option for access restricted to a rental car. So naturally there's a plan to build the worlds largest gondola directly to resorts to address traffic. Cause god forbid we just ran more effective bus service year round.
I've already warmed up to the idea that we'd have to force positives changes through in the dead of night. With all things said and done, watch those who'd rail against it say they've always been in favor of it.
The secret to making things better in the world is that you can't rely on people making good choices, you have to remove the bad choices.
Hating the idea..? Is this another American thing?
Wait until you hear that some not only hate the ideas, but think they’re a conspiracy theory by some higher power to make people….. be able to walk to the shops? I don’t know…
the most propagandized people in history
Show me a car free neighborhood and I'll show you insane real estate prices due to demand.
This conforms to my own experience. I first got on the "anti cars" train back when I was a lib, and I got on that train precisely because I worked a job in a place where I wasn't allowed to have a car, but there was a bus that took me directly to work in the morning and everything else was walkable/busable and occasionally I would take a price-controlled taxi.
Not having to pay insurance or buy gas, not having to find parking, not having to wait in traffic, being able to read or use my phone during my commute - it's all so nice, I got converted before I had ever heard the word "urbanism" and before anyone had invented the term "fifteen minute city".
I dream of the day I can bike safely to my places. Right now I basically have the supermarket and two bars in distance, and then it's a mess of double lane roads and highway ramps before I get to any bike friendly paths to go further afield. It really sucks.
Don't know about other Americans, but I would love to be able to have this kind of lifestyle. It's just not realistic over here due to the infrastructure. It's not within my power to make the changes necessary for it though.
It's crazy to see how the city centre of Ghent (Belgium) changed when they banned non-emergency cars from people not living/working in the centre. It went from some huge carparks with a few people walking between them to large squares filled with people enjoying the city and people who live here.
Every day I bike besides the Coupure channel to the train station and in the city I work in, I walk to the office besides the Dender river. Good infrastructure is basically keeping my mental health afloat.
I lived across the street from a department store, a grocery, some pizza places, a "smoke" shop, video game stores, and everything else I could want on a normal day. It was amazing. I walked everywhere except to work. I miss living there. The main downside was that it was in Florida.