Fuck Cars

Nice to see more countries adopting this practice

… and he calls some random people after he mows down the cyclists, but not 911? How is he only facing misdemeanor charges?!?

I think the developers of this satirical game could be subscribed to this community:

The car industry has identified a few places on earth that do not know THE FREEDOM OF CAR DEPENDENCY.

So they hired you to increase car sales and oil consumption.

How? By building the greatest car parks ever!

Turn neighborhoods into car parks, create the need for car commuting and parking. Use propaganda to inform people on why they need it.

Learn to become a real tycoon.. Asphalt means freedom, right?

I’m not sure if an opinion piece is appropriate here, so please let me know if this doesn’t fit the theme of the community, and I’ll avoid sharing such thoughts in the future.

I’m extremely frustrated with the car centric culture in my area. I live about 25 miles west of a quarry. Every day I watch trains go up and down the railroad mostly carrying gravel. This railroad stretches for several hours by car in each direction, connecting several large cities and even passing a few tourist attractions, and despite our traffic congestion problems there is little interest in trying to use this rail for actual people.

One company moved in and started running a new passenger rail service. Within a few weeks, we had protesters at the railroads complaining that drivers don’t understand railroad crossings. I saw posters about how trains were killing residents when drivers park on the tracks and get hit. I don’t understand! Where do you think the train is going to go? They don’t exactly come out of nowhere. They follow the tracks! And we’ve always had trains passing through our town before. At a later local election a candidate ran on the premise that they’re going to protect home values and our children by reducing or eliminating the number of trains passing through our town. This candidate did win our local election and sadly they succeeded in cutting down on rail investment.

Fast-forward a couple years later. Passenger rail stations were built at the endpoints of this rail to ferry tourists. I drive parallel to this rail on the way to work several times per week for almost 45 minutes each way, 20 minutes of which is heavy traffic. I get to enjoy watching people ride the train while there’s no stop anywhere near my house because our local government has sided with homeowners that a passenger rail station is “simply too dangerous.” I would have to drive over an hour to the nearest passenger rail station to ride the train, and I can literally see the tracks from my apartment.

Every time I see that train I feel bitter. I could save so much money if these boneheads would have let them build a train station in our town. Absolutely ridiculous! The train is there. The rail is there. I don’t understand why a train is such a personal, existential threat to your way of life.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/12940955

People are lonely. Is it because we are addicted to our phones, or is that a symptom of larger design choices we made when building our places? We cover some of the general concepts related to social infrastructure an try to evaluate what to do next.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10212084

Never wait in the school car line again. Here’s how. For the first time in decades, a small but critical mass of children are riding their bikes safely to school again in the US.

With so much of left-adjacent urbanist youtube borrowing terms from conservatives like "third places", I think this video does a good job of questioning the notion of "third places" in favor of a more radical critique about the way we use our cities.

Alternative link: https://archive.ph/BxMKZ

https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/112535649882421445

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16028585

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10092805

In Colorado, that new vision was catalyzed by climate change. In 2019, Gov. Jared Polis signed a law that required the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent within 30 years. As the state tried to figure out how it would get there, it zeroed in on drivers. Transportation is the largest single contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, accounting for about 30 percent of the total; 60 percent of that comes from cars and trucks. To reduce emissions, Coloradans would have to drive less.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/9992203

Source: https://norden.social/@hart/112513927064083221

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16133154

Link to original Tweet: https://x.com/DavidZipper/status/1795048724021862898

Milan has 51 cars for 100 inhabitants, which is the double of other big cities in Europe, like Madrid (291,3) o Paris (225,2). One of the consequences is that traffic is terrible, and Milan is, for example, one of the worst cities on TomTom traffic index

Another big consequence is that motorists will park cars everywhere, because the number of legal on-street parking spots much lower than needed (the number of on-street parking spots is already much higher than other similar European cities) . If you have ever been in Milan, you would know that you can find cars parked on the sidewalks, on the bike lanes, between the trees at the side of the road, on zebra crossings, at the corners of intersections, at the bus stops, double parked (take a look at the pictures in this article to get an idea). This is a big issue, because people with reduced mobility, parents with strollers, people with sight issues are strongly impaired by this situation. Moreover an average of 5 times every day, public transit (trams and buses) gets stuck because of some really badly parked car, causing delays for tens or hundreds of people.

The administration is not willing to help and tolerates the status without doing much except the worst situations. They fear that this will impact their popularity, and may lose next elections. It is a well known fact that getting a ticket for illegal parking is so rare, that it costs less than a legal payed parking spot!

People was so fed up with the situation that and association called "Sai che puoi?" was able to organize an event to count and map illegally parked cars during the night of May 16th. It took a long time and effort, with some tests on a few blocks performed in the past. They also did a great social campaign with posts and videos like this one , and developed a web app on purpose.

The results were astonishing: 2000 people took part, and were able to walk all the 1700 km of the 3780 streets in the city and count illegally parked cars, divided by parking location (on the street, on the sidewalks, between the trees)

Results:

• 64000 illegally parked cars (during the day the situation gets even worse, with people coming from outside the city!)
  • 37000 on the street
  • 15000 on the sidewalks
  • 11000 on the grass or between the trees

This means that the city administration could get 5.3 million euros of tickets in one night, which means the equivalent of 134000 public transit month tickets.

The final aim is to force the administration to act and do something. The idea is that neglecting the issue with such numbers should be more difficult.

I think this is a great story, and I never heard of something like this from anywhere else. I want to say thank you to the organizers and I would love to get this event known outside Italy

"Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now," the study said.

Thread to vent about the dangerous and inefficient infrastructure you have to deal with.