this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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[–] Iron_Lynx 40 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Not entirely correct.

It's obsessive hatred of car dependency. It's not that surprisingly many of us hate cars, it's that surprisingly many of us hate that you necessarily need a car to do anything outside of the house.

[–] MrLuemasG 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Nooo, I ended up having to filter the fuckcars community because they were angry at ANYBODY that uses a car for any reason - like top voted comments and posts. I saw somebody get jumped by multiple responders for bringing up how there are small towns and people that live hours away from large cities that would still need cars for transportation

Like, I'm as much for improving public transit and reducing the amount of cars on the road in every instance where it's viable. I specifically moved within 10 miles of my job so I could start riding my bike to work instead of driving my hybrid car. It's not that I'm pro car, I'm just anti-extremist

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've gotten into it with a couple of guys for needing a truck. I'm a construction electrician. That means that in addition to lugging my tools around, I have to transport rather large and heavy pieces of equipment/gear on occasion. I'd happily rock a van, but it's hell trying to find a 4x4 van (snow) at a reasonable price due to the van life crowd. I've had guys say use public transport or car share, like dude, I work 6 days a week, that isn't viable. It's a completely one sided conversation with them.

[–] MrLuemasG 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My favorite response was somebody saying small towns in America should still have infrastructure and trains to connect them (which I agree with in theory) because every small town in the UK has them without even realizing there are small towns in the US that could fit the entirety of the UK between them and the nearest other town or city.

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

Lol nevermind that many of those towns/villages in the UK are centuries old, while many of the smaller towns (especially out west) sprang up specifically because of the national highway system, and also many have died with the introduction of the interstate highway system. I'm all for improving our national rail lines, but it would need to be implemented carefully to ensure that no more smaller towns die out due to lack of service. And to your last point, this is where specifically a high speed rail system would excel, if only just to efficiently cover the vast distances between US towns.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Nah man, there's some crazy fucking Fuck Cars peoples who don't even think parents of severely mentally disabled children should have a car.

There's always absolute extremists, and they are never fucking silent.

[–] kmkz_ninja -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They use carbrains as an insult. They expect people to add an hour to any commute.

[–] Iron_Lynx 1 points 1 year ago

For one, if something is described as "carbrained," the subject is discounting, ignoring or outright rejecting alternatives to driving. A carbrained take would not necessarily be one that prefers cars. A carbrained take would include things like:

  • "the only way to make more room for people to move from A to B is by adding more lanes to highways!" (a concept that's proven to only make traffic worse)
  • "This cycling lane is not being used. Let's remove it!" (Which may be a fallacy based on the fact that cyclists move more freely in seemingly confined space, or the fact that the specific cycling lane in question may be an isolated lane with no origins and destinations on it)
  • "What? A bus lane? What a waste of space! Let me drive there!" (where the speaker fails to see that one bus easily holds four dozen people, which would mean four dozen cars not on the road, if & only if that bus is not affected by road traffic.
  • "We're wasting money on this high speed railway line between these two cities about 500 km apart!" (failing to see that distances between about 300 to about 800 km are the sweet spot where high speed rail is exactly in that sweet spot of distance where it's faster than both driving and flying.)

For two, the car lobby is already great at needlessly extending commutes. When the Katy Freeway near Houston was expanded to its current width of 26 lanes, the widest in the world, travel times changed from end to end from just around three quarters of an hour, to more than a whole hour. An increase of about a third. I could go on and on about this, but let's just say that it takes a lot more to make trains work worse, and generally, if you try to ameliorate transit service by expanding it, that makes transit better for everyone, including car drivers, unlike if you expand highways.

The thing of the anti car dependency movement is that they demand more developments to not to have to drive. They demand more space be dedicated to more sustainable developments, with less parking, uses closer together, more room for people out on foot or bikes to get where they want to go, all that jazz.

Ultimately, the anti car dependency movement wants freedom. The freedom not to have to drive if you don't want to, don't need to, or for any reason cannot. And that is what carbrained people are not getting.