this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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Fuck Cars

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A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

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[–] [email protected] 94 points 5 months ago (3 children)

No, they ranking the usage of a car as less dangerous. Which is correct.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I'd be curious if that holds in bike friendly places, and would be curious to see statistics from somewhere like the Netherlands.

[–] outsideno1877 1 points 4 months ago

Not really no cars cause a MASSIVE amount of deaths less likely to be the driver potentially but its still far more fatal to other people which imo is actually worse

[–] De_Narm 61 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's true, there is the added danger of being run over by a car. A lot of them actively hate seeing you on the same street.

[–] RustyNova 29 points 5 months ago (2 children)

What? They are right. But that doesn't mean it's a pro car argument. Cars are definitely safer as bicycles can't utter wrecks you like they do to bicycles

[–] MonkRome 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

From what I recall it really depends on how you classify danger. Bikes are more dangerous for non-lethal injuries. But any car trip that you drive over 45 mph is slightly more lethal than biking per comparable trip. So it depends on what danger you're willing to risk.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If you're driving over 45mph, there's likely not a comparable bike trip.

[–] MonkRome 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

By comparable, I mean from point a to point b. If you have a 10 mile commute to work, you have a slightly higher lethality driving a car on a highway, than biking to work, but you have a higher chance of non-lethal injury by biking.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Unless you're also biking on the highway, it's not comparable.

[–] MonkRome 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Maybe comparable was the wrong word but I think think your using that to intentionally miss my point. When assessing the risk of a commute, if you are looking at per mile risk, biking is less lethal but more injury prone.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

So what, does the comment I replied to make sense to people? It has many upvotes but to me seems complete nonsense.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Really, you're going to quote a comedy website/image? It also even depends on what they mean with "dangerous". If they mean dangerous for the passengers (which is a viable assumption since how many deaths are caused by hot air balloons excluding the persons traveling with the hot air balloon?) this could even be a true graph. So hold you "offended" feeling and just laugh at the joke at hand.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if electric scooters are legitimately more dangerous in urban environments with sane infrastructure. Those things can go absolutely anywhere, and can reach ridiculous speeds while cars are far more restricted in urban spaces (yet again, the ones with good design).

[–] NeptuneOrbit 6 points 5 months ago

I agree that you are correct. It's a joke. And it's about safety of the USER.

However, xkcd is a "brainy" and "technical" web comic. The author assuredly has a rigorous definition for anything like the axes in this comic.

[–] Phegan 26 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I mean, it's more dangerous for someone on a bike or Scooter on car-centric infrastructure than it is for someone in a car.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Only if you consider only the safety of the vehicle's pilot. Another perhaps more rational way to look at it is to look at how it affects the safety of all people. And then it's clear that the car is still more dangerous than the bike, even on infrastructure specifically designed for car safety above all else.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

I feel safer being in a car than in front of it. No lies being told there

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I mean, when a car hits s bike the car is more dangerous overall but the driver sure won't be injured by it. I know the accident statistic for electric scooters it absolutely lethal because cars keep killing them.

There is also the question if you count number of incidents or overall harm. Bicyclists scrape their knees and bruise their arms all the time, especially if you also use it in winter and fall.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Bicyclists scrape their knees and bruise their arms all the time, especially if you also use it in winter and fall

I've commuted by bike for decades and I have no idea what you're talking about. How? What causes arm bruises or scraped knees?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It depends on where you live I guess. I live in Sweden and bike everywhere so I hit ice and go down at least once or twice every winter. It's usually black ice in early winter where things look fine and nothing is sanded or salted yet and you hit a curve that is just glass.

Some neighborhoods don't plow the local roads so that the cars just pack the snow and Polish it into an icerink. If you then add powdered snow so that it looks fine you can suddenly go down and slide several meters. In those situations you are a bit fucked because there isn't enough traction to get up again and you have to turtle a bit until you find your footing.

Summer and spring is mostly fine tough with the exception of 2 collisions from other bikes and once when one of the pedals mechanically failed. This is over more than a decade tough so it sounds like it's more than it is but it's still more incidents than my brother have had while driving which is zero.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I would never tolerate falling down regularly. Studded tires work extremely well. I ride through blizzard and on ice and slush without any trouble. The only time I went down due to ice was riding on a frozen puddle where my tires gripped the ice but the ice didn't grip the ground under it. That was a decade ago.

Breaking a wrist or collarbone (or worse) happens far too easily to just accept routine crashing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

More neutral for me, bad for you. Frequent crashing and injury is not normal.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I can say from many, many experiences, you rarely get bruises or scrapes sliding out on ice. It's nearly impossible to get scrapes because the ice is slick, and even if you hit a gritty patch, you are usually completely covered in clothing. Similarly, you aren't very likely to get bruised because sliding out is usually a slow fall, you're not very falling very far, and once again, you're covered in a lot of clothes that cushion your fall.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'll be sure to take your experience into account next time I fall on my ass.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

How do you fall on your ass? The geometry just doesn't make sense to me.

[–] Everythingispenguins 2 points 5 months ago

This is why I chose motorcycles.

[–] werefreeatlast 1 points 4 months ago

Riding a Grizzly bear is right up there with hot air ballooning? Wow! How about riding a grizzly while eating a raw meat sandwich and having a large cut on your leg?

[–] [email protected] -3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This is why we need to segregate cars off the road away from bikes, and then keep shrinking the car lanes by just a few cm each year, until some cars just can't fit, and gaslight the car users that cars must just be getting bigger, until eventually even London black cabs and old mini coopers couldn't fit through, while bicycle lanes keep getting more and more lanes, and the fence between the two starts having barbed wire and more and more CCTV all facing the car users, as the cameras whirr in on faces of the users aggressively, disrupting the silence of sitting in traffic, eventually we install displays inward to the car lanes that show ads, but conspicuously only of bikes, skates and longboards...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

So, the opposite of what's been happening with embiggening cars and unchanging roads in many places. Often designed so that cars could park on either side and still use the road two-way, they're now effectively one-way due to wider cars, but dickheads think they can fit, and bad things happen. I like it, turnaround is fair play. Good luck making it happen.