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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To answer your question on why people are hesitant: they’re not worried about the cities per se, but about the mentality that will then turn its attention to the suburbs and rural areas. There are people who don’t want to live 10mins away from grocery stores because they don’t like grocery shops, or other crowdy places with people milling about. Some of us want to be hermits and live relatively secluded
All that said, I like car free cities. I don’t want denser suburbs tho
I don't want suburbs at all and public policy should make suburbs unaffordable.
Why don’t you want suburbs? Or I guess, the question is why don’t you want other people to have them?
Suburbs, are inherently higher carbon emitting that proper urban areas. For an extreme example, if everyone in the US lived in an area with similar characteristics to NYC, it would reduce the counties carbon emissions by 3/4.
Beyond that, they’re only really able to exist, as they do in the US, thanks to exploitative and predatory economic practices. Almost no one who lives there makes their money there, they work somewhere else, extracting value, and then bringing it back to the suburb to fund incredibly inefficient infrastructure.
I’m not saying ban them complete, I’m just saying, take away the massive amount of economic incentives and support that makes them possible. Build out housing in cities and ensure the value generated in them goes to funding their services, infrastructure and development of the cities.
Make the suburbs pay for them selves and they will nearly disappear very quickly.
I don’t think this is true with remote work. Also, there are businesses nearby which operate on location—architectural firms, dance studios, lawyers, accountants etc. So I think painting suburbs as “predatory” or “absent of economic activity” is an inaccurate and incomplete description.
Regarding the carbon footprint: yes, that can be improved by more commuter rails to the suburbs, and improved energy efficiency in older houses. Encouraging people to grow native plants in green spaces will also help as opposed to “manicured lawn culture”.
I think you’re undervaluing how much people want to live outside of busy spaces, so there will always be some support for suburban living. From my pov, I am more in favor of the rustic, idyllic spaces as opposed to the overpaved, McMansion scenarios that maybe you’re describing?
If you are willing to pay $100/gallon of gasoline, pay for all the roads, pay for the carbon externalities of both the cars and the roads, and pay for the water infrastructure and basically live in a Galt's Gulch, then sure, you can do whatever you want. But that isn't the case today.
HOAs are part of an archaic culture now, at least where I live
City hermit is not my style, but I get what you’re describing. Population density and activity levels are the main issues
I feel like there’s nothing wrong with people having options of where to live depending on their style and personality 😁