Its too bad that Americans refuse to use their 2A rights to enforce normalcy and crush the crony capitalist conservatism that causes these problems
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.
the traffic light was a third of a mile away.
I'm having trouble visualizing this. Does this mean that at a walking speed of 3km/h it would take ten entire minutes to get to a cross walk? Because that's insane.
In Sweden we have crosswalks very regularly, usually like a couple minutes of walking at most. For bus stops farther between intersections there are markers indicating that people will cross, even without a normal crossing marker. For areas which can't have a crossing (you may need to walk around a ways to get under or over four lanes) they put up barriers to prevent walking across.
When Americans complain about everything being car-centric, this is exactly the kind of shit they’re complaining about.
My grocery store is a mile away, but I can’t legally walk there. There are no crosswalks to get to the store. If I’m going to fully obey the law as written, I must use a car just to go to the store.
No there were crosswalks, but the kids decided to "jaywalk" or cross outside a crossing, hence the reason the driver's not being charged. Drivers should be aware yes but it's not expected that children will dart out onto the road, frogger-style trying to cross outside crosswalks, much the reason I am afraid of my dumb dog doing it.
Jaywalking should not be a law on low speed roads. And highways rarely have crosswalks.
But if the crosswalks are unreasonably far apart then pedestrians are being encouraged by the state to engage in unsafe behavior. As I said, they could erect a small fence to prevent unsafe crossings. This is a failure of the state to serve its people.
I'm not sure how to feel about the driver not being charged, but one should drive with the expectation that unforeseen hazards will pop up at any moment, especially children. I would not be shocked to learn that he was driving one of those enormous American cars that makes it impossible to see short adults, another failure of the state. Or that the speed limit was too high. These things would make me feel the fault is more on the state than on the driver. (But it definitely isn't on the parents.)
As for your dog, just keep it on a lead. It's the safest thing for everyone if all dogs are secured properly while going about town.
e: Also his age. How good is the vision and reaction time of this 76-year-old man? How often are they re-testing drivers?
Jaywalking laws, like most laws, vary by State. In Illinois, for example, the pedestrian ALWAYS has the right of way. I think jaywalking can still be a local-level crime, but even if it is, the driver is always at fault for hitting a pedestrian.
@HiddenLayer555 This is a messed up era. When I was a kid from kindergarten and up I walked to school alone. It wasn't a super long distance, about six blocks each way but it was unsupervised, and that was the norm back then. What has happened that it has become so dangerous that kids need to be bussed to school even if they're three blocks from the school?
Car-centric society has made it damn near impossible to walk.
Those six blocks you used to walk have all had their lanes widened into stroads, one converted into a thoroughfare, and no attention was given to pedestrian infrastructure so crosswalks, sidewalks or bike paths are almost non-existent unless you're within 2 blocks of the school.
We have literally built most of our cities, or redesigned older cities that used to be pedestrian friendly and walkable, into a wasteland of asphalt and concrete designed exclusively for personal vehicles.
Have you been to an American school recently? The elementary next to my house could be confused for a prison at first glance. It hasn't gotten bad, if anything it's actually safer than when we went to school. They have promoted a society of individuals ruled by fear.
if anything it's actually safer than when we went to school
Gun violence is the #1 cause of child mortality in the US.
In the home, mostly, yep. Outside the home is statistically safer now than almost any other time. Overall crime is down to historic lows.
Ironically, at this point, and for the last 30 years in the US, owning a gun makes you more susceptible to gun violence. That may be changing, but I seriously doubt it since the cops are now public enemy #1, and have been since the mid '90s.
Oh and before you try to defend the thugs with badges, they were declaring war on the public all throughout the '80s and '90s, by using yellow journalism and Hollywood to manufacture a "war on cops," because people were rightfully questioning qualified immunity. It didn't exist until Harlow V Fitzgerald in 1982. It shouldn't exist at all according to the law as written and recorded in The Congressional Record.
US cops have always been nothing more than glorified slave hunters. It seems that nothing changes in that criminal organization. The DOJ is still reporting that cops commit far more crime than all of the arraigned, but not convicted, potential criminals in the US.
Our most recent school levy addressed basically nothing but turning the schools into jails by wanting to hire a bunch of cops, I dark metal detectors and a bunch of other “security measures” and this is a rural small district, we have zero need for that stuff, why not propose paying teachers better, buying updated textbooks or funding after school care, something but I’m not and never will vote to turn our schools into prisons
There is a pervasive ideal in this country that has been a core part of it since the Pilgrims landed: Puritanical Ethics of "punishment is Divine, to suffer is to be Holy"
Something is wrong? Punish the wrongness until it becomes righteous. If it doesn't work then punish harder.
It's how this country has always solved its problems. Label the other as wicked then beat them into submission.
after allowing him and his brother, 10, to walk home unaccompanied by an adult from a nearby grocery store.
Wtf, are kids 10 and 7 not old enough to walk by themselves to the grocery store now?
Meanwhile all the boomers talk about how they have such find memories of walking around unsupervised until the streetlights came on or whatever lame Facebook nostalgia meme they're parroting
Sorry I'm not following. Are you saying the boomers experienced it and pulled up the ladder like dickheads? Or that anyone who had freedom as a child is a boomer with irresponsible parents? I'm confused.
I think the point is that boomers will say kids these days are too sheltered, and also say unaccompanied kids today are a nuisance or a safety concern. This is a typical boomer double standard.