this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
35 points (97.3% liked)

Fuck Cars

12328 readers
1553 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 CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon'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 topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo 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:

Recommended communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
35
[discussion] Government services requiring car ownership (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
4 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I recently booked some backcountry campsites in a national park (in the USA). My plan is to hike from one town to another over a few days, and the camp sites are by reservation only. These sites are not accessible by road. When i made the reservation, it required me to put in the make, model, color, and license plate of my car. I will not have a car with me, nor could I (since there are no roads), yet this information was required of me (no opt-out).

I'm assuming this is just because the system (recreation.gov) is run by a giant defense contractor (booz allen hamilton), and they want to harvest as much information as possible. It made me wonder what other government services are only available for car owners that are completely unrelated to car ownership. I'm inspired by seeing a post about while ago that talked about government services that require you to have social media accounts.

I'm sure there are other examples of this phenomena.

P.s., luckily, the sign up form is dumb, and it didn't use dropdown menus for car make/model/color, so i just put in gibberish.

top 4 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] pc486 17 points 2 weeks ago

That's probably a bug when translating forms or the ranger's intent. Our rangers deeply understand the meaning of "paving paradise," hence there's limited parking at trail heads. Car details on permit forms are there so rangers can tow away parking abusers instead of cutting down trees to make a bigger parking lot.

Traditionally you'd write "N/A" or "NONE" if you're being dropped off or hiking through. I suspect that detail got lost in translation to the digital format by making all fields as required.

All that said, thanks for being thoughtful and not driving into a national/state park when it's not necessary. Rangers and us like-minded folk appreciate it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

gibberish is best, otherwise i'd try a random foreign car ;)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Technically, you can have 1 reservation on their system with multiple cars, so if you booked like a 15 person site, you could arrive in 4 separate cars. The receipt reflects this with a line item of "vehicles=x". For mine, it says "vehicles=0", so somehow it recognizes that the gibberish wasn't a real car, but i was still required to do it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Then maybe Repost in shitty design ;)