A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
A highway camera photo shows traffic in FortMcMurray jammed in the southbound lane of Highway 63 on the north side of the Athabasca River. The image was captured at 3:11 p.m. MT, about an hour after an evacuation order was issued for four neighbourhoods. (511 Alberta)
Evacuation order issued as wildfire threatening Fort McMurray draws closer https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-wildfire-grande-prairie-fort-mcmurray-1.7203695
What do people who don't own cars do in this scenario?
Not live there. I'm not joking, if you live in Northern Canada the first thing you'll save up for is a car, or you'll know people who own a car.
It's not just remote places that can get evacuated.
I don't live in the north, don't own a car, and don't worry about it, but if something catastrophic were to happen here, I hope there would be options for the many non-car-having people.
I'd cycle and camp. I reckon I could cover 50-100km a day on a bike, possibly more if motivated by emergency. 20km city riding takes me an hour usually.
I almost have the proper gear for this... I'm sure I could make it work in an emergency. A good contingency idea. I think I've done about 80k in a day before, and it wasn't particularly strenuous... you can cover a lot of ground on a bike if you just keep going.
In other countries, where motorcycles are common, you'd see a good portion of them zig-zagging past the mostly stopped cars. While carry capacity is severely limited, compared to a car, it's still better than nothing.
Now, people without any means of transportation are pretty much fucked, because to evacuate, you need time to pack some of your shit and some way to transport it with you. Depending on the event, you'd have to choose between GTFO ASAP or packing the most you can. Even if a government provided buses for people without cars, how long would it take for everyone to finish packing their stuff inside and getting in before it's too late?
This reminds me of watching a Vietnamese YouTuber talking about getting through a major typhoon. I don't think they explained how the buses were organized, but there were buses.