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:
Been living in NYC for (oh no I'm old) many years. No car. No complaints.
People imagine "the city" is all times square on New Year's Eve but it's not. The streets are rarely empty, but it's also almost never shoulder to shoulder dense.
I find the suburban emptiness depressing, personally. I like other people being around.
Mmm'k, I'll take the bike next time I'll bring 300kg of concrete from the store...
The problems is not having a car. The problem is taking its car everyday for less than 5km to go to work.
Yes, you can live without any car if you live in a big city (in 30m2 apartment 😝), eat in restaurant, go to cinema, etc... and love this way of living.
But if you want a house, with decent garden, close to nature, then it becomes hard to live without car. Not that you must take your car everyday, I have an electric 50cm3 equivalent bike to go to work.But yeah, when I do the garden and have 3/4m3 of organic waste, it's hard to evacuate this by bus...
@borokov @veganpizza69
Ironically, your car is destroying the nature you want to be closer to. If you really love nature and the outdoors, using a car to access it is like being a toxic ex-boyfriend who refuses to let go and calls it love.
But what's the alternative?
I'm not talking about the big national parks, which should absolutely have mass transit to shuttle people into it.
But the smaller parks, national/state forests, and public lands? I do a lot of backpacking so I'm regularly at an unnamed trailhead in the middle of my local national forest where we've been on dirt roads for the last 45 minutes. There's not really any feasible way to build public transport to service all of that, and I would very very very much not want them building actual roads for busses or rails for trains.
An alternative in this case is carsharing or taxis. Car ownership is a big issue, for every carsharing car you can get rid of up to 10 vehicles.
Lmfao what are you talking about? There's zero chance you'll find a ride share or taxi willing to take you out on seasonal roads. And that's also ignoring the fact that a lot of these are going to be ~2hrs or more away from an actual town so it's not financially feasible either.
I'm talking about going out into actual nature. Still very far away from civilization.
OK, those are the solutions for people living in a city center. Commutes are short enough to walk or bike, and for longer trips, there is a bus or tram every five minutes. Got it.
And what would be the solution for those people living outside the city centers? Biking from here to the city is 20km, nearly an hour downhill towards the city, but at least one and a half back up. Busses go every hour, but only Mo-Fr during the core hours. In the evening or on weekends, bus traffic is spotty, to say the least. And Trams, well, we don't do trams or trains in the country.
Design better cities. End sprawl.
But it's probably too late for cities already designed to be suburban hell to make any changes that dont involve redesigning and tearing up half the city. I mean, its possible but unlikely in north america at least
You have to differenciate between sprawl and people living outside the city basically forever. Remember: cities are the new things, not the other way round.
I'm pretty sure cities are like as old as history. They certainly go back a while https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_continuously_inhabited_cities
Cities are centuries older than cars though. Cars are the new thing. And yet it's true that cars are an obvious QoL improvement for anyone in a rural area, and no reasonable person is suggesting that people in rural areas shouldn't drive cars.
The real issue is that Americans (among others) have decided they want all the convenience and amenities of living in a city (sewer, water, energy, convenient access to most goods and services, etc.), but they want to pretend they live in a rural area, with no density whatsoever. This has resulted in the suburban sprawl that is financially ruinous and requires cars to be able to go anywhere and do anything, which creates traffic, which we solve by building bigger roads and pushing things farther apart, creating more traffic.
Thus, the answer really is that if you want city amenities, you need to live in a city. It doesn't have to be as dense as New York. Not Just Bikes just posted a great video about the smallish town of Bergen in Norway that is not a super dense urban hellscape, it is medium density with human-centric development.
Nobody is suggesting people in rural areas to live without a car.
Fuck cars is about eliminating car dependency in cities. Actually, forget eliminating car dependency. I'd be happy if we could stop this silly car size arms race and ban these huge pickup trucks and SUVs in cities
That should be any city.
I became much richer when i moved into the city and sold my car.
Cars are a drain on your money, time, and mental health
I spent enough money to buy a house in 15 years of rent in the nearest city.
I rode a bike and subway mostly of that time until we got fed up giving landlords all our savings and bought a car and moved to the country to start a family.
So it's bike, bus, train and walk. I mean, yeah.
Step 5: Get hit by a car while on your bike and wind up with lifelong injuries because your city does not have bike-friendly infrastructure and riding on major roads is essentially a death wish.
Lol, you think horrific injury with permanent loss of limbs stops north americans from driving?