Fuck Cars
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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"It turns out not burning a bunch of fossil fuels leads to less pollution"... news at 11.
The really dumb part of all of this is that people have just accepted cars as the default mode of transportation for so long that it's hard to even envision a world without them. They're normal, despite being expensive, dangerous, horribly inefficient, killing people actively (crashes) and passively (air pollution, plastic in our lungs, parkinsons/dementia, obesity, and more), and directly contributing to isolation in our communities. Every car we can get off the road, especially in our cities, makes the world a better place.
Hey hey hey, don't you know the real solution to vehicle deaths is to get a bigger car?
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2023/mar/19/suvs-are-more-popular-than-ever-in-australia-but-there-is-a-downside
@MisterFrog @azimir And keep driving faster and more distracted and encouraging the government to widen the roads to speed up traffic.
Its an interesting angle because that is what we did exactly with smartphones and social media too. We adopted them so voluntarily as if they were the best things happened in this century.
But looks like in todays world we could have been a much better society without them ever existing
For all the doomscrolling we do on smartphones, I’m still of the mindset that there are many ways their existence has made people’s lives better. For instance, I likely never would have become so transit-brained if not for smartphones. I practically have nightmares of trying to navigate train maps/schedules through nothing but paper and a loose idea of where my destination was.
Ahah never heard transit-brained before. That always fascinated me. I could never relate to my friends having a hard time with directions. I could always look at a map and compass and find my way.
I remember reading somewhere that due to increased reliance to automated navigation systems, people are losing physical navigation skills.
I think for me, it’s just difficulty with training steps, the same way many students struggle with the common ways of teaching math, but are great at it once practiced.
I used to religiously follow directions around my area. Now, I bring my smartphone for safety, but I often find myself navigating without it.
I’d still struggle with paper alone, since there would be so many turns I’d want to verify - and quite often, street signs are obscured in some way.
That wasn't an accident and it didn't just 'happen;' it was the very deliberate result of a combination of automobile and oil industry propaganda and US government policy back in the 1930s-1950s, motivated by several factors ranging from utopian modernist city planning to good ol'fashioned racism.
Some random sources to get folks started:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement
https://www.strongtowns.org/curbside-chat-1/2015/12/14/americas-suburban-experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_(New_York_World%27s_Fair)
https://www.pbssocal.org/history-society/the-birth-of-sprawl-how-ending-the-great-depression-meant-inventing-the-suburbs
there's also the argument that pushing to distribute population centers away from cities forced the soviet union to manufacture larger and more numerous atomic weapons to maintain parity with US capabilities.
not in the "hey we want to save as many people" way it's portrayed, more like, let's make it harder for the sov's to equal the potential megadeaths we intended to dish out
…And we’re totally not moving to suburbs because we’re racist.
exclusively bulldozes entire black neighborhoods while at the same creating redline laws that prohibit black people from owning houses in the suburbs. peak racism policy
We needed that freeway there too make our commutes from the ~~racist~~ suburbs shorter.
The crazy thing as well is that especially after COVID people will use the isolation of cars as a positive. You have people who don't like transit cause they would have to be near other people. Which just shows how crazy isolated and disconnected from our communities we are in the US atleast.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motonormativity
I'll definitely have to check out the underpinnings and use of that term. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
After I've moved I could technically do everything using public transport and bikes
The issue is that public transport is literally more expensive than a private car for me in the Netherlands (as I get a company car)
Perhaps ask the company to reimburse you for the transit costs rather than providing the car? I'm sure they would love to save the money, and let you continue to save the money the car was saving you.
Even with a privately owned car, driving somewhere is often still cheaper than public transport here. Including when factoring in maintenance. The only thing that might offset it when driving alone is parking costs.
Every time my wife and me want to visit a city I look at train tickets as it would be convenient to just get off the station in the city centre, only for me to realise that I’m way better off just driving there, and then use buses/metro to get around the city itself.
It's probably not cheaper if you consider the externalized costs. Sure, you don't personally pay up front for all the pollution, traffic, and poor use of space, but everyone does.
I have an OV pass to use public transport for work but I get to use my car privately for free (outside of extra taxes) and not the OV pass
That just sounds like a policy revision away from being fixed. Have you asked?
I was planning on checking after I moved but nit high hopes, org is pretty rigid
Yeah, "you get to keep the car, I get unlimited travel pass, deal?" People often seem to think policies are iron clad, but they're just decisions.
Might be hard because the car is a significant upfront investment. The sunk cost is another big reason people defend their cars.
I've got a flex lease which I can end at any time so sunk cost should not be an issue here 😄