this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Solarpunk Urbanism
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A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
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I like trains because if I notice I forgot something important 20 minutes into a one hour commute it will set me back two hours and forty minutes.
Why would you go the whole way to your destination and not exit the next stop to return home?
I take the express train. I don’t want my one hour commute to be a two hour commute because they stop for five minutes every 8 minutes and have to get back up to speed. I already have to wake up ten minutes earlier to take the light rail, change trains to a local, take that three stops to a hub, and change to the express train. I should just buy a car.
Oh damn. That kind of sucks :/ do you often forget things at home?
I really enjoy commuting by train + bike, it is really cheap and kind of fun to be active before and after work. But my commute (at least the train part) is quite a bit shorter.
Depending on weather or track maintenance/construction I often think about getting a car as well. But then I remember how stressful commuting by car is and that thought is gone
One time I did all my grocery shopping for the month by train but I had to bring six friends to help carry everything home and I had to pay for all their tickets there and back. I bought them all dinner for wasting hours in their day to do what one person could trivially accomplish with one car. It actually ended up being cheaper to just pay the premium for instacart and tip the driver.
Why the fuck would you do all your grocery shopping for a month all at once? Do you not live anywhere near civilization?
Well as apparently it takes them hours to get to their destination... probably not.
Why is this a valid point in the urbanism instance then?
It’s usually cheaper and more time efficient to stock up on more things less often. I don’t have the time or inclination to doodle around the Fred Meyers three times a week to pick up a single baguette.
That's the dumbest argument for cars I've ever heard. And I've heard a lot of dumb ones.
“I can go wherever I want whenever I want and carry a reasonable amount of cargo or people if need be” trumps any other argument against cars. 😉
Extremely relevant to bring up in a post about urbanism and trams of course. So did this experience make you hate all public transport by association?
Don't forget things.
This is victim blaming. Tired of getting brutally and violently raped? Well just don’t get raped ya silly goose! 😒
If you got off at the next stop and turned around you’d add maybe an hour to your commute. A car would still be 30-40 minutes. Plus trains are way less stressful since there’s no dealing with idiot drivers.
If your commute is an hour by train, it's gonna be like >2 hours by car in traffic. But sure, if you ignore all the benefits of trains and only look at the downsides they look bad.
In all seriousness I have commuted into a major city for various gigs throughout my life, including driving in at trades rush hour (5-6am), driving in at normie rush hour (7-10am), and driving in at off hours (around 11am-12pm) and a one hour drive leaving at 5am would be a two hour drive leaving at 7am and it would be a 30 minute drive at 11:30am. Taking the train in generally took about an hour +- 20 minutes depending on getting to the station, finding parking, and catching the correctly timed train. The delicious baked-in luxury of being alone and going wherever you want in a car instead of having to pile in another fart tube with 100 other people also rules.
The real answer is: it’s complicated and painting everyone with the same brush is kind of shitty.
Now imagine a tradesman dragging 400 lbs of tools and equipment back and forth on a train every day and on every train and bus to each job site. Then the fresh new hell of losing an additional hour every day because train run every 15 minutes from 7-10am but only on the hour before that. Now the 5am and 6am trains are jam packed SRO full of carps and welders and electricians all with their full kit. Dooming labor to a dystopian hellscape by thinking 0 steps ahead and idealistic nonsense.
That's a very edge case scenario to bring to the table as a counterargument... Like my buddy who was sceptical about reverse cameras in cars because "and what if it breaks?". Well, then we just use the rear view mirror like we always did. Nobody is arguing for abolishing them, just as nobody is arguing for completely abolishing cars.
“Forgot something” probably isn’t the edge case scenario you think it is, it’s just a matter of convenience vs necessity to fix it. If I forgot my lunch I’m not going to ride the train into the city then back then back again, but if I forgot the only copy of the keys to the work van well then I have to.
Sure, have contingencies in place, but the real world does not often go as expected.
Living in Europe I completely don't share that sentiment.
Cars should be used only when necessary and actually save significant proportion of time, otherwise cities become inhospitable hellholes and everyone loses (including cars now stuck in traffic).
But then again, I don't forget things too often, and in other post I saw you said that you regularly need to make a 3 part jurney. This would be a good situation to get a car.
Could you imagine if you were forced into a transportation situation that didn’t meet your needs? That would suck. Luckily we are all free to choose what works best for ourselves.
As an extremely forgetful person who commutes by public transit myself, this is why you make a mental checklist to run through before you leave home / the office. Phone, wallet, keys, lunchbag, anything else important you need for that day.
The trick is to run through it every single time you leave for your commute, no exceptions. It does take a few repetitions to get in the habit. But once you do, it'll dramatically reduce the number of times you forget anything important.
So here’s the thing with that- doing the exact same thing every day is even worse for me because the memory of doing it every day for the past x days occasionally ends up ticking off the check box in my mind for today as well. Also the way my brain is wired it often ends up counting “remembering to do/bring a thing” as “doing/bringing the thing”. It’s a wild way to live life and it’s a constant patchwork of coping mechanism and cheats and hacks to get things done. AirTags help out a great deal.
If your commute is an hour by train, then with traffic it will be like two hours by car. But yeah if you ignore the upsides of trains and only look at downsides they look worse.