Image transcript:
Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) sitting at a lemonade stand, smiling, with a sign that reads, "Trains and micromobility are inevitably the future of urban transportation, whether society wants it or not. CHANGE MY MIND."
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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10 or 20 years from now when you're taking a nap or jerking off or eating fried chicken or playing Call of Duty while a self-driving car (you can call it an "automated transportation pod" if the word "car" triggers you) takes your extremely drunk self right to your front door you'll think it's fine.
I live in a 15-minute city. I take the bus home, now and in 20 years time when I am 77 years old, only with the help of a walking aid, but luckily our buses already have low entrances to allow disabled people to get on. I also stay with friends when I drink and come home the next day, and I do not need or want to eat or play games on the way home, and I especially do not want to masturbate in a car, automated or not, I want a nice and comfortable place for that. I prefer to look out of the window and experience the journey and stop and eat something. That you seem to basically live in your car, maybe except when you need to shit, is car brain thinking for me. A car is not a place to live, it's a means of transport with a lot of flaws, I'd love to see your face when you're jerking off in your automated car while it decides to drive you right into fresh concrete, onto train tracks or into the nearest river.
I do not own a car and never have, and I have survived well. If the world doesn't recover from car brain, we won't survive as a species. Automated transport is the future for buses and trains, not individual transport, which will always be worse in every way, only topped by flying taxis, which are even dumber.
Funny side note: Saudi Arabia has started building the most idiotic "city of the future" you can build: The Line, but they also killed the car, because even they realised that cars, automated or not, are not the future and you can only get around in this futuristic place by walking or by train.
The problem is most people don't live in 15 minute cities and it's impossible to turn the suburbs into 15 minute cities as most things are just physically too far apart.
If you live in a gigantic McMansion neighborhood that takes 5 minutes to get out of by car and then your job is an additional 20 miles away there is no bus or train solution - you'll have to have a car.
Funny you should mention living in your car. I used to have a 40 mi commute from my suburban town, each way, to work. I lived slightly north of Baltimore and commuted to just outside of DC. I would spend an hour minimum each way driving. When traffic was bad easy 2 hours. I did this for 4 years and it was soul destroying, but it was an extremely lucrative job.
Then I found a job in my little suburb that pays about the same amount of money and it's close enough I can ride my bike to, which I do sometimes when it's not hot, by car it's only about 5 minutes. The extra time I've gotten back has been amazing and looking back I would have taken 20% pay cut to not have to do that horrible commute.
That is not a solution for everyone as there aren't enough jobs in the suburbs to support the population. They're called bedroom communities for a reason.
I'm really not pro or anti car. I just think you have to be realistic. The realistic part is the suburbs are just too spaced out and too far from jobs to have a functioning mass transit system.