this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
771 points (98.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
9790 readers
945 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 Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don'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 topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do 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:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes it will. How can it ever become anything else than car centric if you can’t get around without a car? People need to go places, and bike lanes get them there without cars.
I’m really trying to understand what’s tripping you up here.
Because having parking isn't what makes it car centric. Having bike lanes doesn't stop it from being car centric. Cities and neighborhoods are designed for cars, and cars will always be the preferred mode of transportation as long as cities and neighborhoods are developed that way. Cities need parking because they are car centric. Cycling, and living in a city with cycling, is a luxury. It's not a bad thing, but it's not going to help, either.
To answer your question, public transit is how you get around without a car. Spend the money on infrastructure, and reserve lanes for busses and light rail. Reclaim roads entirely as pedestrian paths. Force developers and city planners to create walkable communities.
Revisiting the vegan metaphor, everyone agrees that beef production is bad for the environment. If you're running a steakhouse, you've built your entire restaurant around beef. Adding a page of salads to the menu is nice, but it's no less of a steakhouse. They won't sell significantly fewer steaks just because there's a salad on the menu. People will still choose the steak, because it's a steakhouse and that's where people go for that specific thing. To reduce the amount of consumed beef, you have to change the restaurant.
I think you rode that little hobby horse way further than it’s able to take you.
In the mean time, I’m off to the beach. It’s 15km away. Shall I take my bike and ride it on our nice safe bike paths? Or will you arrange the sea to get brought closer to me?
Oh, you're not an American. Gas in 4€ per liter and you have transcontinental railways. Enjoy the beach. At our current rate, the beach will be getting closer sooner than you'd like.
Except later in the evening when many lines stop or get very infrequent. Catching that late movie? Walk home.
Getting the kids in public transportation in a hassle. Teaching them to bike and have a safe environment for them to bike in is more fun.
Cargo bikes to move groceries, little kids and other stuff is easy enough. Getting those groceries on public transportation is not that easy.
And a bike is usually much faster to go over one or two stops instead of waiting for the bus.
Both public transportation and bikes have their use.
Some cities are car-centric because we designed and subsidised infrastructure to make it so. We induced a demand for cars by spending billions on building, expanding, and maintaining highways to the point that people hop in their car for a 2km trip. People now have no choice of transport other than a car, and that's a problem. It's literally killing us and our children whowith road violence, lung cancer from emissions, and via our climate.
Your steakhouse metaphor is akin to the entire city consisting almost exclusively of steakhouses. But why bother changing it, all cities are designed only for steakhouses. You don't get a choice to eat other cuisines because it's so inconvenient to go across town to the one Greek restaurant.
not inherently
has that ever happened? during the mad cow disease scare, there was a decrease in production that necessarily led to decrease in production, but production has climbed almost unfettered since then.