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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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:
cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/23351353
Thank you for wording it so eloquently.
I learned quickly the car took away my freedom. I needed a car to get a job.
I was suddenly forced to have a job to pay an auto loan. By the time I paid the loan I needed a new car as the first broke down.
Then I needed my job to pay for the 2nd car. If I lived closer to the city with public transport I likely would have never gotten a car in the first place.
Cars are basically a life tax
Also, people younger than the legal age for driving are unable to get around safely and independently if they live somewhere car-dependent. I know this from personal experience (although where I live car dependency is not the only problem of course)
@callyral @grue don't forget disabled people. Cars are always touted as the solution for disability but there are *many* disabilities which completely remove driving as a possibility (blindness, epilepsy, many learning disabilities, many physical disabilities ... And generally being elderly, if we're honest) and car dependence leaves you entirely reliant on a chauffeur of some kind for any and every time you want to leave the house.
How do I get to and then around Michigan’s Upper Peninsula? I don’t want to go be in cities like at all? What’s the plan for that?
With a car, you can fix it yourself if you are determined enough. However, if you're using public transport, the same arguments apply + now things are enirely out of your control. There's no way in hell the public transport company will let you tinker with their broken stuff. The insurance company can pull out of them at any time for any reason. The company can go bankrupt, etc.
i feel like independance and not having to rely on someone would work better as an argument for the car.
No matter how determined I was to work on my car, it didn't matter. That shit sucks, is hard to do, especially if you don't have previous experience.
Also, cars today aren't roomy 1990's (or before) engines. They pack it so tight in there, with the need to specialized tools and knowledge.
Cars have become increasingly hard to work on oneself. Especially as computers and mechanical engines have been fused together.
I'd rather have my bike with a lane, or a sidewalk, lined with trees, than have stroads with rubber dust, smog, and noise, uninhabitable to pedestrians.
Isn't anyone else disturbed by the concept of independence being a problem for this person?
I'd like more public transportation in America, but I'm not really interested in anything else they have to say.
@moakley @grue Unless you're living in a forest that's nowhere near another human being, hunting and gathering all of your own food, moving around entirely on foot (or on animals you personally captured and trained), wearing clothing you made from materials you personally gathered from the environment around you, YOU ARE NOT INDEPENDENT. Even the smallest rural settlement has interdependence as a fundamental requirement.
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@moakley @grue Car drivers depend on a whole bunch of things, as noted above. But farmers do too. They rely on people making tools, and in the case of motorized ones, supplying fuel and maintenance for them. They rely on markets to sell the products of their efforts to permit them to exchange with other people for other necessities like clothing or food other than the food they themselves produce. Etc. etc. etc. Everybody depends on everybody else in a society.
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No, because your premise is incorrect. This person is completely in support of the concept of independence, but simply rejects the notion that car-dependency provides it. Real independence is achieved by removing the dependency on cars.
You didn't read the second line?
"Now the whole idea of independence is a messy social construct with a bunch of issues that I won't get into right now."
I don't see how anyone could interpret that as anything other than a blanket statement about independence.
I searched up the artist to find more evidence and saw that I wasn't the only one who thought that, because they posted a follow-up attempting to clarify that specific line. The clarification just reiterates the point of the original comic and doesn't try to explain why that phrasing was used or what it could have meant.
So maybe they just phrased it poorly, but I'm not the only one who took issue with it.
Acknowledging that a concept is complicated is different from being opposed to it. You deciding to interpret the statement the latter way instead of the former is your own problem, not theirs.
They literally say:
"Now the whole idea of independence is a messy social construct with a bunch of issues that I won't get into right now."
(Emphasis mine). They are not just saying, "it's complicated." They literally use the word "issues."
How is claiming that independence is a complicated, nuanced concept problematic?
It sounds like you are interpreting it as if they are saying it doesn't exist or something similar which is not at all what they said.