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.
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I had a friend who was killed by a motorist while walking on a country road, so I've given this some thought. The key principle for safety is to keep cars away from more vulnerable road users.
So, there are the same basic options: better public transport infrastructure, and well-signposted, properly maintained footpaths and bike lanes are the most obvious.
As for driving from the countryside into urban areas, you can have 'Park and ride' schemes, which are common in parts of the UK. You drive your car to a bus station at the edge of the town, and the bus takes you the rest of the way in. That minimises miles driven and keeps cars out of urban areas, where they're especially inefficient.
Public transportation in a rural area lol have you ever been to a rural area?
The rest of your ideas are great. I've done the park and ride thing, it was great.
Yes, of course. My point is that you can have good public transport in rural areas. The fact that in most places we currently don't is the exact problem!
I noticed that in poorer countries where many people can't afford personal cars, the public transport in rural areas is often much better. This has led me to believe that contrary to my initial intuition, widespread car ownership is the reason rather than the result of poor public transport in rural areas.
I can't think of how. Rural areas are areas with little organization, very little infrastructure, people are largely self sufficient. Would it be busses? Minivans? How would you organize such a system? Where would it even take people, Walmart? To each other's doorstep? I just don't see how you'd build something like that, or even really why. I get it in the city, I get trains for long distances, but rural areas getting people around, I just don't see it.
Are you speaking from experience of rural areals? Because if so, it doesn't match with mine!
Most rural areas I know of are heavily dependent on neighbouring areas, whether other villages or larger towns. So the public transport option which works best is buses: Usually they connect a chain or ring of smaller villages with each other or with a large town. Having bike lanes or footpaths (separate from roads) to connect the villages works, too. And the UK, historically, had many small train lines, including single track routes, that did a similar job to the buses.
Yes, but mine probably doesn't match with yours.
Rural america is not like rural Britain. Rural Britain is probably more like the outer undeveloped suburbs of a city in america. In rural america, you can go a hundred miles on a highway without seeing a single house.
I like the bike lanes and footpaths idea for rural places just as much as anywhere. I don't hate cars like a lot of the people here, but I dislike them a lot and understand why you'd want cities not designed around them, and in rural areas, other options. Busses or trains between population centers, even small ones, are great but in rural america you're not even getting to the train station without a car, and more stops doesn't solve that problem because it's so spread out and disorganized. Even 100 years ago, cities built subways and what not, rural people rode horses or if they got on a train they were going pretty far away. Public transport in places like that doesn't make any sense and didn't even before cars.
Yeah, fair enough! I was thinking of places in the UK (and other areas of Western Europe I'm familiar with) where even 'isolated' houses are usually less than five miles away from a larger settlement. I've been in plenty of places where I'd just walk across or around a field to get to the nearest shop - which was more direct than taking the road!
In terms of the rural US, I think you're probably right that solving these problems with human-powered vehicles and public transport is, basically, too hard, and that cars are the best available solution. That said, it's probably still worth building the infrastructure so people have the option of not using a car for the whole of every single journey.
@frankPodmore @betwixthewires Here's a map of what the train network used to look like across rural Victoria (in Australia) in 1927: https://everythingismaps.github.io/img/historicvicrailmaps/1927%20Victorian%20rail%20map.PNG
And here's rural NSW in 1933: https://www.nswrail.net/maps/nsw-1933.php
And here's a video that @nerd4cities recently uploaded about the destruction of intercity train networks in the US: https://youtu.be/svao4PZ4bGs?si=K7zrMlZ4bvfmiRcC
So yes, many rural areas and small towns in the US, Australia, and Canada used to have access to frequent and reliable train services back in the first half of the 20th century.
Those train systems in many cases were privately run, so no direct taxpayer subsidies. At a time when overall populations were smaller.
So what changed? Car-centric government policies.
Thanks, that's interesting! Always like it when I'm provided with evidence that I am, if anything, slightly too sympathetic towards cars.
What else has changed? Cars became available and roads were easier to build than tracks.
I'm not against trains, I love them, especially the prospect of using them for long distance travel between rural areas. But people in rural areas use cars because there was a natural incentive to use cars: they're faster than horses and trains and the roads were already there, bonus they can be used for work on the land as machinery. Car centric government policies really are an effect of the widespread use of cars. They entrench the current way things work and create inertia in moving forward from it, but they didn't create it, at least not in the middle of nowhere.
@betwixthewires Cars faster than trains? If that's the case in your country, then you have a serious underinvestment in rail.
(Seriously, even V/Line trains in Victoria go faster than the 100 KP/h speed limit, and by world standards V/Line ain't a great train service.)
What happened in the US, Australia, and Canada was a massive investment in rural highway infrastructure by national and state/provincial governments after World War 2.
In the US, that was Eisenhower's Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_1956
In Australia, it was Gough Whitlam's National Roads Act of 1974: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_(Australia)
Many towns in the rural western US were railway towns. They were quite literally built around a train station.
But after WW2, the US spent the equivalent of US$193 billion (adjusted for inflation) in just 10 years building new interstate highways.
At the same time, the extensive already-existing network of rural railways saw service cuts, was run down, and had privately-owned lines become freight-only.
Again, similar story in the other former British colonies.
That was a choice by government. And the result of that choice is many people in those railway towns responded by buying a car.
It didn't have to be that way.
In many parts of Europe and Asia, where leaders have invested in rail, you can live quite comfortably in many small towns without a car.
I meant when the development of transportation infrastructure started, cars were certainly faster than trains.
Which only works as long as the P&R placed don't just alter between "full" and "closed". Another common fallacy is to put them so far out of town that the only line to the city center and more central traffic hubs is a tram that has 20+ stops between P&R and Main Station.
Yes. Again, there are good and bad ways of implementing these things. I was also just thinking that having hire bikes at P&Rs would be a good idea, to give people more options, and that train stations bordering rural and urban areas should also be effectively P&Rs.
Keep in mind that there are more than enough people in this world for whom a bike is not a solution.
I did not say that bikes are the solution for everyone or everything, so I don't know why you felt the need to say this to me.
I live in a place where what you are describing is already implemented, and it does make a lot of sens, but there is still some issues:
So there is still a lot of people that prefer to use their car to go to work or simply to go to the city, which causes insane congestions on the main road around the urban area at some points in the day.
I agree, those are obviously issues in many areas. But infrequent, unreliable, overcrowded public transport is a result of political decisions, whereas the car congestion is a result of geometry!
I also think it would be good if more places of work had staggered or flexible hours. So that, e.g., some staff work 8-4, others 9-5 and others 10-6. That would spread out the single hypothetical 'rush hour' into three busy hours. I'm not sure how exactly you could implement that at scale, granted. Possibly if governments started to do it, it would catch on in the rest of the world of work.