Because to them, ‘car’ and ‘vehicle’ mean the same thing.
Because then they keep the “freedom” of driving, but without the guilt of pollution. That and, I mean, the community is called “fuck cars.” Obviously someone not taking a closer look at the true root of what this community wants (city planning that isn’t car-centric) would just think “but electric cars ain’t bad.”
Of all the subreddits we should’ve left on reddit.
This braindead circlejerk never should’ve come here. You are all completely disconnected from reality. Enjoy your larping.
It is possible to block communities on lemmy, if it is bothering you that much.
First thing I did after seeing this post.
Why do you think it’s braindead and disconnected from reality to want people to be able to live without a car?
But but everyone can live in a city and we can magically redesign them all to be walkable with no environmental fallout! We certainly never heed anyone to live on say a farm or in a place where trains can’t function.
deleted by creator
Cool sell your tractor then
deleted by creator
Cars offer nothing but death and destruction under the guise of freedom. Those who can’t see that are the ones disconnected from reality.
Personally I enjoy cleaner, quieter cities and safer streets, but I guess that’s just nuts, right?
“Cars offer nothing but death and destruction”
Fucking lmao can you hear yourself?? Seriously?? That’s the only thing that cars offer?? I wasn’t going to reply further in this thread because this community is a fucking joke but your comment was so profoundly stupid I just couldn’t help myself. I’d call it a braindead take but it’s just so insubstantial and incorrect that I’m not even sure it qualifies as a “take”.
Are you an 18th century horse salesman? Carriage driver? Farrier? Or are you an edgy middle schooler who just found their first shitty internet opinion?
You are so far gone from the real world I doubt you could ever make it back to planet earth.
Pull your head out of your ass and pay attention to reality. Grow up.
The car and oil industries are killing the environment and the cars themselves are a leading cause of death in cities all over the world. I’m not the one who needs to grow up here, bud. I live in reality, and that reality is a dying earth and death defying walks to work when cars won’t respect my inability to protect myself against them.
If it weren’t for the car and oil industries we’d have efficient trains taking us across the country instead of fossil fuel chugging planes and individual automobiles.
We need both good public transit in cities and good car infrastructure in semi rural areas. Cars can be extremely useful.
deleted by creator
I would argue that those who are disconnected from reality are those who believe in a system that essentially requires every single person to own and operate a 2+ ton piece of heavy machinery just to get groceries or go to school or work.
In cities, yeah sure. But in rural areas? How is that gonna work without cars?
If the only places using cars are truly rural areas, that’s still a major upgrade.
And by some countries’ metrics, there’s a high bar for truly “rural” where they won’t have a train stop. By then, you’re barely addressing anyone.
Who gives a shit? Nobody lives there anyway; that’s what makes it “rural!”
Rural people don’t matter (when it comes to this topic), and pretending they do is nothing but concern trolling.
Imagine thinking all people outside urban areas can exist with a bike and public transportation. Ignorance is bliss, eh?
Yeah wow the 15% of people who don’t live in cities should really be our highest priority to keep in mind at all times when designing cities.
Well that’s not what I think.
What I think is the majority of people on this planet live in urban areas. In wealthy countries like in Europe, North America, and Oceania, the share that lives in cities is an overwhelming majority. In those areas, who represent the vast majority of the population, we have often systematically gatekeeped access to schools, jobs, and groceries behind a massive paywall that is the ownership and operation of heavy machinery. Urban areas absolutely do not need car-dependency. Rural areas are obviously different, and fixing car-dependency for 80% of the population will actually improve things for rural folks: less suburban sprawl means less encroachment of suburbia into the countryside.
I respect your point but fundamentally disagree with it. Your utopia of having sprawling public transportation networks is not achievable in any realistic timeframe due to many factors, nature being top of the list. You’re also clearly biased in your urban belief. Population growth drives expansion, and you ignored the sections of the planet still booming, lacking proper infrastructure, and growing rapidly in and out of urban areas.
Would this work in Europe,? Sure, but that doesn’t make you correct in applying it world wide.
Most growth in the world is in urban areas. There’s a reason most projections expect the largest cities in the world by the end of the century to be places like Kinshasa, DRC. Much like London grew precipitously during its industrialization, like Shanghai and Beijing grew during their industrialization, now growing stupendously are the cities of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The fact of the matter is most growth globally is occurring in cities.
And yes, poor infrastructure is an issue. When NYC and London industrialized, they built massive subway systems. And if you want to grow with car-dependence, it still requires infrastructure. Instead of railroads, roads. Instead of trains, parking lots. Instead of depots, gas stations and charging stations.
And yes, I agree it will be a massive challenge to rebuild our cities in places like North America, but we already did it once, only about 60 years ago. Our urban freeways were built by demolishing entire neighborhoods. Our urban parking lots came from demolishing dense, historic buildings. Our urban roads came from tearing up massive tram networks. For example, Melbourne Australia has the largest tram network on the entire planet. Why? Because they were the one city that didn’t tear up their system with the advent of the automobile. Before cars, basically all cities in US/Canada/Australia/etc. were built on truly massive public transit networks.
But the beautiful thing about fixing car dependency is it will actually be easier. Instead of demolishing neighborhoods, the main thing we have to demolish is parking lots. The land values in city centers are absolutely insane, and housing will get built if just legally allow it (just look at Santa Monica, where new California housing law saw a historic flurry of housing project proposals). We currently make it literally illegal to do so across the vast majority of our urban land.
Edit: For reference, I was born and raised in American suburban sprawl, so it’s not like I’m some holier-than-though, out-of-touch European who has never set foot outside a transit-rich city. Further, the current model of car-dependent suburban sprawl is inherently financially unsustainable, and it will come to an end sooner or later. We might as well save ourselves the pain of a slow, excruciating collapse like Detroit and choose to go in the direction of a more environmentally and fiscally sustainable model. We genuinely don’t really have a choice.
I was under the impression that most growth was in SUB-urban areas and urban and rural have been shrinking. The sub-urban category is largely made up of small towns and bedroom communities. Even in the best laid out small town the best public transit is a bus with limited stops, since the reason people are leaving bigger cities is mostly cost and ratepayers are unwilling to pony up for real transportation.
Yeah this is ridiculous, I’m all for mass transit but good luck getting anything done outside of a city without a car. Idiots. Yeah let’s just go back to horses.
I can’t wait for the REM (bottom left picture) to open, it’s in less than a week!! After so many years, at last.
my area doesnt even have sidewalks
US rah rah
See and I get the opposite problem.
I wanted to buy an electric motorcycle since I use my old gas bike to make the same trip for work two times a month. The trip is 215 km and only goes though one town (about 45 km from one end). This is easy with most gas motorcycles and I thought that an EV version of a hwy cruiser should have no issue with say a 250 km range (since I stay the night I can charge from a slow plug).
Well let me tell you how frustrating “city” brain is about EVs. I mostly got e-bikes (like a bicycle) tossed at me, and the few that make the cut (Damon HyperSport, for example) are geared like a rocket and all the stats are based on city riding. 200 km max speed and no hwy gearing is stupid, but hey CITY CITY CITY! Where are the non insane vehicles? I don’t want to ride a 0-60 in <3 second monster, I don’t want to be curled up for 3 hours on a crotch rocket, and I don’t want to deal with an app just to charge. We don’t all live in your cities, some that do need to leave said cities, and until a normal non toy like EV vehicle hits the market the wider world will lump it all in the same bullshit pile.
I don’t have the option for a public transit, hell they killed the trains and buses off even if I wanted to do the milk run.
This made me curious; but I feel like there’s two issues.
One, the whole demographic for motorcycles is lugnuts revving their engine. Generally, they’re not all that practical, and more of a personality/lifestyle choice. The closest thing in other countries is scooters, which are a cheap and common option but not viable for highways.
The second is fuel density. Electric cars can slip battery into all the hidden corners, but bikes have less room.
It doesn’t seem like an impossible problem to solve, but it might come slowly just because of the first one.
I just want the vehicles from Minority Report, is that so much to ask for?
But you can’t disrupt an industry without cars! The shareholders won’t like that! /s
To everyone reading this comment. Remember that all “disrupting” ever meant was using venture capitalist’s money to undercut the prices of existing services with a crappy mobile app tacked on. No “disrupting” startup has proven to be sustainable or profitable in the long term. That’s one of the factors in the most recent wave of tech massive layoffs. AirBnB, Uber, the millions of food delivery apps, even Netflix, their value proposition dies when they have to charge for the actual costs of operation.
Autonomous vehicles work better on rails. Also without having to deal with pedestrians.
And when space efficient enough to allow for a livable city.
Except that they have much lower rolling resistance and much longer lifespans of both the road and the tires.
Are you trying to argue seriously that cars are more efficient than trains?
I just bought an electric motorbike, design is like a Vespa. I love it. Top speed kinda sucks but I love it. I’d love to take a train or bus instead but there is literally no line between my work and home that doesn’t involve a longer walk than the ride itself.
Care to share the one you’ve bought? 🧐 I’m also considering one
I bought a Segway/ninebot e300se. It has a range of wltc ~85km (or ~130 with a 3rd battery) and a top speed of 100km/h and it cost as much as an high end electric bicycle.
https://eu-en.segway.com/products/segway-escooter-e300se
Note, apparently, that former US brand doesn’t sell in the US. .
Wait, what about autonomous bicycles?
are you actually seriously addicted to hard drugs ?
→→ \s ←←
Accusing people who said something you didn’t like of drug addiction isn’t very poggers
its a joke
No, jokes are funny
ok well sorry, liberal, its called dark humour.
(again this is an attempt at a joke ok.)
Sometimes people try to make jokes.
Because not everyone does or can live in a city? That e-bike would be crazy impractical for my buddy who lives on a mountain in rural WV.
Not everyone lives in your circumstances.
Why does everyone think cars are practical for 100.00000% of commuters? My friend is a blind amputee that lives under the Indian Ocean in an air bubble. Ever tried navigating by car through 1000 feet of sea water with no arms when you can’t see the road?
Thus, let’s get rid of all cars. They’ll never work.
There is no place for logic on this sub!
Only endless complaining and pretending that everyone has the exact same situation. And god forbid we have choice too.
I’ll take mass transit if it is convenient, I’ll hop on my electric bike when I want, but I also will take a gasoline car or electric car if it makes more sense to do that or if I simply want to go cruise around for a bit.
It sounds like you think the only solution is one that works for every situation. “We all must have helicopters because that is the only way into my volcano lair.”
Strawman argument. Try living outside of the dense urban bubble.
Dude. I have lived on a sailboat, a powerboat, a tent, a sleeping bag, a highrise penthouse and more. It’s not a straw man. I am calling out your argument not making a new one. Stop playing to the camera.
Careful, your privilege is showing.
But the vast majority do, and solving the problem for them is good enough. Who gives a shit about the exceptions? They aren’t relevant.
“But muh rural special snowflake” is nothing but a bullshit derailment tactic and you know it.
I’m not rural - hell, I live in a suburb of DC - but I couldn’t survive without a car where I live. I’m 5 minutes from a grocery store by car, but 30-45 by bus, not counting waiting time for the bus to arrive.
Should cars be phased out or otherwise forced to downsize? IMO, yes - over time. But do we also need to drastically overhaul our public transit and walk/bike infrastructure? Absolutely, and this should happen first.
Should cars be phased out or otherwise forced to downsize? IMO, yes - over time. But do we also need to drastically overhaul our public transit and walk/bike infrastructure? Absolutely, and this should happen first.
That’s not how it works. The presence of cars ruins the viability of everything else because the parking lots physically force destinations to be too far apart. In order for the change to be effective, you’ve got to demolish the parking and wide roads first and thereby drive an increase in other transportation modes due to necessity.
[overhaling transit] should happen first.
That would be difficult. High speed transportation infrastructure such as roads for cars and public transit is expencive to operate. If you try to add high quality public transit to a place where lots of money is spent on roads for cars, you need to pay to maintain two expensive infrastruture systems at the same time. Cities cannot afford to do this while maintaining the quality of both.
I think we should stop subsidizing car ownership and use this money for more ethical forms of transportation. This will cause people to decide to use public transit where possible, the increased use of public transit will lead to more funding for public transit which will improve the quality.
This change to subsidies will be painful for people who have been benifiting from the subsidies. For example, drivers will have to pay for parking, and property taxes in low density suburbs will go up, car insurence rates will increase, and you would probably need to pay a tax for miles traveled by car. But I think its worth it, becasue it will be highly benificial for users of public transit, which tend to have lower wealth, and a net positive for society.
I agree that inexpencive low speed infrastructure like bike lanes should be implemented as soon as possible.
I find public transportation is also subsidized. Any attempt to increase fares to cover costs gets a huge amount of push-back. People already pay for parking except on private lots. There are a lot of lower income people who have to use a car to work and live who’d be hit hard by price increases.
I find public transportation is also subsidized.
The subsidies for cars is quite high, and it ought to be low because it is a destructive form of transportation. The subsidies for transit is quite low and should be high because it is the superior solution to the problem of moving people around.
Any attempt to increase fares to cover costs gets a huge amount of push-back.
Car roads having fares to cover costs isn’t even a part of the discussion in the US. User fees (mostly gas tax) account for ~1/3 of the cost of roads, and this percentage is declining source. That means people who make the ethical choice of not using a car are paying for those who make the unethical choice of using a car.
In general. I think it is good for the tax code to encourage prosocial behavior. Right now it does the opposite.
People already pay for parking except on private lots
This does not match with my experience. Where I live, and almost everywhere I have been, curb parking is usually free. And when its not free, it is highly discounted from the price of the land if you were to use the land for any other purpose.
Also, there are a lot of private lots. This is usually due to the strict parking mandates, where the government forces developers to build parking lots. This leads to a parking abundance where drivers refuse to pay reasonable fees for parking.
I recommend Henry Grabar’s recent book, Paved Paradise on the topic of parking.
As the other people mentioned. In North America, the percentage of urban populations is 85%, Latin America 81%, Europe 75%
Yes, rural areas are probably in need of private vehicles, but not everyone out of those 85-75% of people need a car. We’ve become too reliant on them.
Those stats are a bit misleading. For example, I live in a “urban” environnement, aka a town, but the closest anything is still 15km away.
What is an anything in your mind
What we do have at a walking/biking distance is a bakery, a pharmacy, a coffee shop, an antique store, two art galleries.
Anything else such as food, school, work, train station, doctor, veterinary, you name it, is 15k away.
It sounds like your town needs a tram station
Not really, trams are only good if you need more capacity than a bus can provide on a fixed line which is not the case. What we need is exactly the opposite, a small capacity and a flexible route.
The thing that has the most chance to work in the near future, from a practicality and cost point of view is, imho, a fleet of on demand self driving electric minibus that can serve all the township around.
Note, we already have on-demand minibus, it’s basically a bus with fixed stop in all the local towns that only come if requested and available, It’s just not very available due to a shortage of drivers.
Fair point, but I still think it holds true for > 50% of people. That is still a huge percentage and the rest of the people that would need vehicles wouldn’t need such destructive infrastructure in the middle of cities. Cities could be a lot more compact, walkable and without 15 lane highways running through the middle. The vast majority of traffic in cities is caused by people who could replace that with public transport or walking in a better planned city.
Now America is a lot more problematic there because of suburbanisation, idk how you fix that at this point, but I hope that it’s possible.
I don’t think you do “fix” suburbanization because people who live in suburbs probably want to live in suburbs. Not everyone wants to be in a dense city, for me that sounds like hell.
that’s an argument to talk about electric cars at least some of the time, not to exclusively talk about them at the expense of any other transportation option. According to US government statistics, people in rural areas make up about 15% of the population, why is their situation dictating the national conversation around clean transportation?
A great majority of people do live in cities or suburbs, which are great places for electric vehicles and autonomous railway systems.
Not all urban areas can have workable public transit systems fir example New Orleans would not take to trains well at all given a significant chunk is under sea level and sinking.
And how are cars and roadways immune to this?
They aren’t nearly as permanent and are easier to replace and repair. Building a train system in New Orleans would be neigh impossible as anything underground will be destroyed by flooding salt water and anything above will be torn apart in hurricanes.
Not every city can have mass transit and it’s probably time to ask if we should attempt to preserve the cities that cannot be modernized with mass transit.
Reading about New Orleans, it looks like a lack of willingness from administration to actually support the system after Katrina, including not enough funding to replace busses, wrong schedules, making the streetcar share the road with personal vehicles. Same old North American city making the same old excuses.
What I read: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2018/11/20/new-orleans-public-transportation-000796/
So nobody lived on that mountain before cars were invented?
Should people return to premodern life because you don’t feel they should enjoy the quality of life you have because they do not live in a city?
They should return to premodern life if it’s the only way to avoid climate collapse and the end of human civilization. Going back to the industrial age is better than being sent back to the stone age.
Fortunately, we don’t have to do either, because there are safe, clean, modern solutions to transit.
So others should have a lower quality of life so yours can be preserved. That’s a great outlook. Im sure you’ll be quite successful convincing others to do this.
EVERYONE is going to DIE if the climate collapses.
However, those who do live in those circumstances would find such things useful. It’s okay for something to benefit less than 100% of the population.
Bicycles are one of the most energy-efficient ways to travel, and electric ones even more so. But absolutely no one refers to them as “vehicles”…
deleted by creator
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say nobody refers to vehicles as bikes
Because a train isn’t going to drive me from home to anywhere that’s not a train station.
It seems a lot of this argument comes from an idea that trains need tracks but cars can go anywhere. This is patently untrue.
Are roads cheaper than tracks? I don’t think so, but I would love to hear what evidence others have.
I don’t think that’s the right metric, tbh. Even if you swapped out every paved road with a train track, they would not have anywhere near the same utility as trains. Trains have much higher capacity and efficiency but much lower granularity than cars, they fit into a different part of the problem domain of logistics. And while yes, using cars as a one size fits all solution sucks, the same is true for trains – hell, at least while inefficient AF, cars do actually function in this environment, while trains are flat out incapable of addressing our modern day logistical needs.
Also, fairly sure dirt roads are hella cheap.
My point isn’t that we shouldn’t reduce cars, it’s that reduce and eliminate are different things. And as long as cars exist, it’s hella stupid to object any improvement in them. (The self-driving thing is in fact stupid though, but that’s because it’s proven to be a ridiculously hard problem that we do not yet have adequate solutions for, not because it’s not something that would be helpful if we managed to crack it.)
As someone who works in rail infrastructure management, answer is yes, roads are cheaper than railway network. Hell yes actually, by a factor of at least 10 for electrified railway. A poorly maintained road is uncomfortable and you might damage your car, a poorly maintained railway means derailment and fatalities.
What if there were more than one type of railroad?
I mean, trains -do- need tracks. When they don’t, they become cars/buses, for all intents and purposes.
As to prices, from a quick search, tracks are more expensive per mile, but I didn’t see anything talking about maintenance cost. Hopefully these sources are reliable:
- 3-4 million USD per mile (~2020 prices) for train tracks, assuming flat rural terrain - https://www.freightwaves.com/news/commentary-do-you-want-to-build-a-freight-railroad
- ~2 million USD per mile (2014 prices) for highway, assuming flat rural terrain - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-a-mile-of-road-actually-cost
So because the infrastructure doesn’t exist at this moment, it can’t ever exist?
Are you arguing trains will one day stop wherever they want because those are called trams not trains
I’m arguing that public transit can expand from where it currently is.
And I’m agreeing but saying that’s an innovation we already have lol
instead of creating more car infrastructure we could make more train or tram/metro infrastructure to make sure there’s always a station a walkable distance from where you want to be
For planning future communities, sure. It does not make sense to try to shoehorn trains into many parts of the cities we have today.
not above ground.
How about shoehorning roads? Do they make more sense? Cause that’s what’s happening in a lot of places. My town had electric trams and big green spaces downtown in the 50s, but they’ve extinguished the tram lines and demolished the green spaces to build freeways cutting straight through historic neighbourhoods.
Of course not. If neighborhoods are being built with proper transit in mind, why would I ask for unnecessary roads…
why not
Works for cities, doesn’t work outside cities or for small countries.
That is not entirely correct. Look for example at Switzerland.
Sure, there are limits, you probably won’t have a train station at every farm 50 miles from everything else, but you also don’t need large cities to make it work at all.
You’ve got legs, and if you can afford a few hundred dollars you’ve got wheels. By all rights, anywhere you need to go ought to be walking distance from a train station. The reason it’s not anymore, is that Americans demolished their cities to build parking, and now everything’s too far away.
European here. This is so ridiculously wrong and dismissive.
For one, no, even a country with far higher population density than the US doesn’t cover everything with rail. That’s a highly privileged city-dweller take (and I do live in cities and feel kinda uncomfortable in rural towns because it feels like there’s nothing to do). Because yes, in a large city you do have a ton of options within easy walking distance from subways and light rails, but that’s not even close to the case for everything else. Once you leave the big city everything is also too far away in Europe, for more mainstream things you’re stuck with lower quality local establishments (or you luck out and have one of the best ones nearby in your proverbial backyard, but it doesn’t apply for everyone) and for more niche things, everything is just prohibitively far away.
For two, “anywhere you need to go”? How do you decide that? Like do you not have friends or relatives who live a little further away, or in a logistically hard to reach place? Do you not have hobbies for which the locations are just hella hard to reach by public transport? Hell, with the design those networks can get sometimes even nearby places can be super far away – for example, here in Budapest lines for getting into the inner city and out are very well built out (although, minor nitpick, they’re often buses, not trams or trains), but moving laterally along the outskirts of the city is next to impossible. There’s a pretty good supermarket near me with many different options that I’d need about 1.5 hours to get to, one way. It’s about 15 minutes by car.
And speaking of, for three, you fail to account for time constraints. Scheduling is a major issue, I have literally never faced a situation where going by car wouldn’t have been nearly twice as fast as it is with public transport. I’m lucky enough to only be a single train ride away from my workplace, no transfers necessary, but my commute is still an hour one way, while it could be 30 minutes by car. That’s an hour every office day (thankfully we’re hybrid) that I’m never gonna get back. Similarly, while yes, you can get nearly everywhere by some form of public transport (very unlikely that you get literally everything covered by rail though, unless you live in a large city), there are a lot of places that take a ridiculously long time to get to, and the further out you live from the city center the more you’re exposed to that effect.
Trains are awesome, but they’re not a one size fits all solution.
The logical conclusion for all the problems you’ve listed is: build better public transport infrastructure. All those are arguments against car culture, not for it.
Yeah, we sway toward cars way too much, and the US is even worse in that regard. My points were just that
- being dismissive about people’s concerns won’t win us any favors, and
- cars cannot yet be displaced entirely, so making them greener is always a benefit
We can have multiple solutions working in parallel to address these issues. In fact, that’s the only way we’ll see any result, since the problematic systems weren’t built one by one either. And we also need to be on the lookout for people pitting us against each other: it’s one of the oil lobby’s favorite pastimes to push people toward solutions with less and less real-world viability in a reasonable term, and convince them that the actually short-term viable solutions are dangerous because they only half solve the problem and society is going to get stuck with the half-solution.
We need better public transport, and we need electric cars, and we need both yesterday. You can be against car culture while accepting that car culture won’t disappear overnight so having it fuck up the earth less over its remaining lifetime would still be a benefit.
We can have multiple solutions working in parallel to address these issues.
Exactly, that’s the whole point I’m making. Just because cars can’t be displaced entirely doesn’t mean they can’t be displaced where possible. And it’s possible in many more situations than current car culture would lead you to believe.
![[meme] Why do people only seem to mean cars when they talk about electric and/or autonomous vehicles?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8b4f07d2-ffe9-468c-a7da-0e970998b67f.png){kind=link}