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I’d appreciate it if the user who donwvoted this post could expand his opinion on this subject thus contributing to the conversation.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
449 points (94.3% liked)
Fuck Cars
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I didn't down-vote this, but if I had, it would be because:
- People already have cars and already need infrastructure, which is (in most cases) already in place, but requiring maintenance for safety reasons
- It's only zero-sum if you can't afford both
- Public transportation has a bad reputation in the US around safety, hygiene, etc. Not everywhere, some cities do a great job. Unclear where this meme is taking place.
- I can cross state lines in my car, but not with a tram, making it less versatile - I can go anywhere I want, in fact.
- I control the heating, air, music, occupancy, etc. of my car - Not so on public transportation.
- I control my car's schedule to the minute. No interstitial travel to get to it, no waiting for it to arrive.
- Some people use a car as a form of self expression. I don't, but there's plenty who do.
- You may have to share a seat with someone. Plenty of folks don't want to do that.
Shit I just saw what community I'm in. Sorry, ya'll - I didn't realize. I'm new here. 9. They down-voted because this showed up on someone's feed that didn't subscribe specifically to a community that already hates cars.
I am glad you brought on some very common talking points, I will gladly explain to you what is my (and presumably the community's) answer to them:
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This is true, a one-day zero-to-100% ban on cars is probably not feasible, as many nations have parts of their economies based on people being moved by cars (even though the pandemic and remote working showed us that A LOT of those people actually do a job that requires them to commute waaay less than we thought, but this is another story). This is somewhat of a silly point though: people also used to have slaves, hell, we used to run our entire economies on slaves. That did not stop us from seeing that was not a good thing and change that over time. Total ban of cars tomorrow? Sounds cool but not really achievable. Promoting public transit? Restricting car traffic in area where cars clearly don't belong? Making it an easier time for who wants to walk or use a bike? Hell yeah.
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Public transit is overall massively cheaper than cars, for everyone. Just think about it: the cost of a car society is the cost of car infrastructure (you pay it with your taxes) plus the cost of your car, your insurance, the gas (which is actually "cheap" in the US because it is subsidized with taxes so again, you pay that), the maintenance (these costs are unloaded directly on you). In London, which has one of the most expensive fares around the world, owning a car ends up costing on average double what you would pay to use transit daily. My city has a €250 (~$300)/year transit pass. Everything included, as many rides as you want, to wherever you want. I use it to commute daily and hang out. We happen to have a car in my family, but we have the priviledge of rarely having to use it.
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True, in fact we advocate for better public transit in the first place. As you said, there is an insanely vaste amount of places in the world that actually do transit great: most european cities have very good transit, but also a lot of US cities (NY, SF, Chicago, etc)
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No, you clearly can't cross state borders with a tram, because that would probably be called a train. In europe you can take high speed trains that go over 200mph and cross entire countries in way shorter times than taking a car (a lot to improve in the future, especially interoperability, dont get me wrong, its far from perfect). Same goes for Japan, and China (but their trains are also faster, and more interconnected as, obviously, it is one country). Transit allows you to go where lines have been built, and for most places around the world that is basically everywhere you could possibly ever want to go. Cars allow you to go where your state has built a road for you.
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It has been long since I've taken a service that didn't have heating/air conditioning. I do listen to my music when I commute, I can actually also read or browse feddit, watch a video or study, while the bus/tram driver drives for me. I will give you the point on occupancy, but hum, unless you hate people I don't see a problem in that. Edit: In several years of taking metros/buses/trams it only happened more or less 5 times to find an "annoying" person on my same ride. Meanwhile, I assure you that almost EVERY time you drive here you are granted: i) a honk for no reason ii) someone not resoecting the right of way. It is faaar more probable to go this close to a car crash than to find an "annoying" person on transit, at least from my experience.
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I also control my transit schedule to the minute. Despite my city's transit having one of the worst looking apps made by humans, I can actually check live-time where the bus or tram i need is and when it will be at the stop (and when its main lines i dont even need to because there is one every 5-7 minutes). You know what i hate instead? Getting stuck in traffic. That really has to be a pain for those 15 cars clogging the two car lanes (one is actually blocked by illegally parked cars), while me and other 50 homies fly by them on the bus-only lane. Also, on the same commute, I had to always add an additional 30 minutes ahead of leaving to account for traffic, making the gains against a bus virtually nothing. But of course you can only make this point if your city is well-served by transit lines.
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I don't either, I don't think anyone cares about those few people, this community is really about the other 99,9% of motorists.
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I don't get what you mean with "share". I have not in my entire life in any country of this world seen a seat for two people. What? You mean to seats next to each other? Because that's... Two seats. There is not really much sharing in it. Need further explaination.
This community is called fuck cars but is really actually about wanting cities designed for people rather than cars (which is how human settlements have been made for basically thousands of years except the last decades). Well shit i made a wot but thats my take, to put it shortly
I wholeheartedly agree with the purpose of this community and what it advocates for, but I wanted to add some rebuttals to your points.
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You mention you have the privilege of not using your car. In car centric parts of the world, which is anything that isn't a big city, this is a privilege. My family that lives in a town of 50,000 people in Germany still need to use their cars every day! There is only a bus system to get them around. Each working age adult uses their car every day! Including the one who lives in Köln and literally walks across the street to his office because car transportation is far more time efficient than transit.
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See anecdote above. I live in Boston, which is supposedly extremely transit friendly and the T and commuter rail, while remarkably extensive, are abysmal. I rode it for two months until I finally gave up and got a car. I live in a house 0.5 miles from the commuter rail station and it's the cheapest around at $750k, I should be able to have reliable transport to MIT/Kendall.
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Your issues with driving, being honked at, being annoyed with lack of right of way, all seem to come from inexperience driving in the city. On roads with speed limits of 30 mph, there is no right of way, it's just about whoever goes first. After some time, you learn what to expect from locals and adapt to their style. But I understand if driving in a big city makes people uncomfortable. There is a lot going on, and a lot to pay attention to.
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Schedule. My god is our transit schedule awful. Commuter rail only once every hour. It's either 5 minutes early or 20 minutes late regularly. So it's completely unreliable. The Red line is now slow as fuck. Crawling at 10 mph in most areas now. It's faster to ride your bike between stations, and get stopped by every traffic light than it is to ride the train. And now the red line only has service every 20-30 minutes!
I loved visiting London. We even got a rental to see things like Stonehenge or Brighton, but I never felt the need to use the car much within the city. While I thoroughly enjoyed driving through parts of London like tiny bridges that had inches of clearance on either side of the vehicle, or massive roundabouts near Victoria station, I never needed to do that for local journeys.
It takes 30 minutes for me to drive to work, but 50-90 minutes to go by public transit and I literally live in a massive transit corridor with service from my house directly to work. It's absolutely absurd. Essentially, transit only broadly works in US if you live in NYC. It's too sparse in SF to be used widely. Too sparse in DC. Chicago is 10 times worse with it's urban sprawl. And unreliable as fuck in Boston. Boston doesn't even have a reasonable train to the goddamned airport (yes I know about the blue line, but it's still a 15 min bus from the blue line station, and you can only transfer to the blue line from the green line).
This is why people drive. Because for the vast majority off us, even those in Europe, there is no better alternative. If transit was so much cheaper, then why doesn't every village of 10,000 people in Europe have a tram? There are simply too many places people want to go, and only extreme density can make transit cost effective.
- Yes, but please join me in finding ironic the fact that nowadays not having to own a car has become a privilege. It is a "privilege" that has been artificially built into our societies. Taking the US for example, car companies in the 50's bought and demolished streetcar lines to force more people to use their cars, created entire propaganda campaigns to remove the streets from public transport and pedestrians, and literally indoctrinate children with their agenda. This is a video I always recommend watching, as it goes through all these points from a US-perspective. This absolutely did not just happen in the US, this a map of the tram lines in my city in 1929, this is it nowadays.
About smaller settlements, again, while I DO think that a good public transport is possible even there (I think Switzerland is a good example of how that can be done, maybe the Netherlands? Someone in the comments will sure tell me better examples, thank you commenter), I feel like the prime scope of this community is on cities, aka where the big stuff goes on, where people live, work, shop and hang out (very good article about that).
3+5. I agree, infrequent or unreliable public transit is like no public transit at all (okay not really, but it sure is bad). There are two ways to make good transit: you either make it so frequent you literally don't care about the schedules because you know the next ride is going to be at the station in 10 minutes or less at the most (hello, japan?) or you strictly schedule stops so that users can reliably know at what times the service will be there (I am obviously more of a fan of the first option, but the second probably applies better if you have a very small budget like a 5,000 people town). I suppose the reason you gave up on using transit despite living on a transit corridor that goes to your workplace is the lack of both, correct me if I am wrong.
- I have to disappoint you on this, but I took my license driving here. I passed my driving test with no errors and I have never gotten into a crash; I always drive at the speed limit. What happens to be the reason one gets mostly honked at here, is actually following the rules: going at the speed limit rather than 50% more than that, or giving the right of way to a car in front of you which has it by law. There is no "local driving style" here, there is just anarchy resulting from decades of total lack of traffic rules enforcement, which goes hand in hand with having one of the bloodiest amount of deadly/injuring crashes in europe every year. Driving doesn't make people just uncomfortable, it makes them stress. For an intelligent and curious species like humans, doing an extremely boring and repetitive task to which they are supposed to give their full attention the entire time, is stressful; road rage is very common, to the point it has become "normality" here, crashes are as well.
Point 9 makes sense.
Number 9 is my favorite.
I wonder if there's a middle ground most would like. Where I live our suburbs have a train pass by them so we can ride to the city after a bike ride or short car trip. It seems ideal, actually.
It amazed me how I had a blind spot for the elderly and disabled (saw a few blind), who might find our car-centric transport either prohibitively expensive or exclusionary.
yeah, point 8 hits the nail on the head.
lots of people just dont like to share.
gluttony is one of the well known 7 virtues. /s
I prefer content, articles, advocacy, and discussion to memes.
Perhaps we can splinter off fuckcarmemes?
Looks like it's undownvoted, so probably a misclick. When the up and down votes are that close together, it is surprisingly easy. I mass downvoted a bunch of stuff earlier today before I caught myself and corrected it.
All of those mistaken downvotes were actually upvotes.
I like swiping to upvote in Voyager/Wefwef, but I do end up downvoting by accident from time to time, before I fix it.
Perhaps the post aligns with the downvoter's opinion but they simply deem it a bad/uninteresting post.
puts extinguished torch down
Tax dollar usage is the main excuse why people in my state have been protesting the rail. I guess sitting in traffic for 2 hours to and from work is preferred.
I think its because they don't see how it will benefit them specifically.
Yeah. A common argument against bike lanes in my city is that "nobody bikes", and people don't understand that nobody bikes because we have to bike alongside their murder boxes.
Also, bikes generally don't take up a lot of space. A bike lane can be cooking in passenger-miles/hr and look pretty empty compared to urban gridlock in the car lanes.
A very apt analogy you can reply with is this.
Nobody swims across this river to the other side. Therefore we should NOT throw away money by building a bridge. Because there is no demand.
Considering being a massive fan of cars, I'm so glad I live in Scotland. You can walk pretty much anywhere, Very cheap trams for some cities, fantastic bus service and the North Coast 500. People and cars can co-exist but the way some places seem to be doing it is not exactly brilliant.
Scotland sounds nice. How is the bike infrastructure?
Some people argue that there's too many bikes lanes, so I'd say it's quite good haha! There's also some amazing mountain bike trails in Scotland so there's something for everyone, bikewise.
You guys are too good for the rest of the UK.
Legit Chicago. No work on the CTA that desperately needs a new line (or several), but just spent $800m ($300m over budget) on the Jane Byrne Interchange and immediately started work on Kennedy for another $150m (will end up being at least $300m). I can't help but imagine if they took that billion and spent it on the CTA instead
Oh, hell yeah, fuck cars came to lemmy, that's my jam🍌🚗
Is the scraggly beard guy supposed to be a protagonist or a douche? I can never tell with these comics because he looks exactly like I'd imagine a typical basement dweller generously fancy themselves.
To be honest I have seen him taking so many different stances in many scenarios that he could be both the protagonist and the main villain of any meme
Sometimes on errands or whatever when I get out of my car I kind of disassociate for a minute and will look out at the achres of parking lot, trying to imagine what might have been here once, what could have been here if things were different? Then I snap out of my trance and continue my tasks just feeling a bit more melancholy than I was
Yeah but I am way more comfortable in my car, it goes exactly where I want it and I have complete control over the accessibility soooooooo
Bigger roads just leads to more people driving and more traffic, whereas more people using public transport leaves more space for those who insist on travelling with their living room to move unhindered.
This is very common points that come up on this topic, and they are reasonable really, but let me disagree for the following reasons:
I am way more comfortable in my car
This one is obviously very personal, so agreeing or disagreeing makes no sense. We can agree however that when you drive you have to only focus on the road; some people sure enjoy staring at the asphalt or at the ass of the car in front of them while they drive in traffic. Meanwhile on transport one can read, watch a video or even browse feddit posts while a professional driver is paid to do the annoying repetitive part for you. Also when you get on transit the air is already conditioned, meanwhile when you get in your car you left in the parking lot under the sun you enjoy your ass and hands burning while your face freezes to the ac at the max power trying to cool down your box of plastic that turned into a oven.
it goes exactly where I want it and I have complete control over the accessibility
Yeah, meanwhile the transit company of my city calls me every morning and tells me the exact places I am allowed to go today. I definitely don't take whatever line i need to take to go wherever i need or want to be. Jokes aside, if you have bad/non existent public transport in your area your point is understandable. That is literally what we advocate for though, more public transport where there isn't. Cherry on top, I actually have a car and a licence, I just almost never need to use it, because my city has decent (far from perfect, but) transit.
induced demand.. Wait until everyone does the same thing as you are.
This shit is cringe as fuck. Looks like it was made by a naive 16 year old.
We are not in high school anymore Kevin... saying something is "cringe" doesn't make you sound cool nor invalidates the other person's argument, lmao.
Comment like yours give me hope. This proves that Lemmy has grown beyond techies and has spread among "regulars".
lol do you think techies hate cars?
Loving or hating cars is profession agnostic. I am in IT and hate the car dependent infrastructure. So what's your point?
My point is I'm a techie and love the freedom and convenience of personal vehicles, along with many others. If it’s “profession agnostic” why did you even mention techies in the first place?
Where have I said in my original post that techies hate cars?
Can you point it out?
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