Fuck Cars
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
-
Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
-
No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
-
Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
-
No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
-
No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
-
No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
-
No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
view the rest of the comments
The comparison is completely honest. It is dishonest to pretend that trains aren’t generally full and a line up of cars ever are.
Completely honest! All cars are at least 4.5m, especially in the city where hatchbacks like the golf (4.2m) reign supreme. And what driver doesn't love driving in bumper to bumper traffic, named for the more than two full car lengths between them and both the car in front and behind.
Not to say that the point they are dishonestly trying to make is invalid, but this is definitely playing with assumed numbers to exaggerate the point.
ah yes, the 0.3 meters difference in car length makes this completely "dishonest". Throw the whole thing out because they used 4.5 instead of 4.2.
I don't even get your point about car following distance. A line of totally immobile cars bumper to bumper is illustrative of nothing. Using the ideal scenario for car storage is hardly "more honest". I have no idea what is motivating all this weird nitpicking.
If it was paired with a second data point that was honest then obviously not, but when it provides two metrics and both are exaggerated to embellish the claim then it clearly isn't trying to be even handed.
Are you kidding me? Two full car lengths each side is unheard of even on an Autobahn in heavy traffic. This is by far the most disingenuous claim - it alone literally approximately quadruples the distance the cars require. Heavy traffic in city streets should approximate something like 1m each side (half a car length total). Obviously a fully loaded train is orders of magnitude better either way, but an honest comparison wouldn't overstate the length required for the cars by a multiple of 4.
Trains are generally at their fullest when cars are at their emptiest, during commuter hours. Tube trains are near empty (maybe 10-15% of capacity) for most of the day and night, whereas those who do drive at those times are likely groups of workmen or otherwise groups of people going to the same place
If that's true, then we are obviously comparing like-for-like: busy train commute time, busy car commute time. Which makes it a completely fair and representative comparison. "This isn't fair because what about when no one is commuting?" is a weird complaint.
That said, I'm skeptical that for most of the day trains are "near empty" and that for most of the day cars are "likely full of groups of workmen". Do you have a source for that?
If I were to say "at 3am, almost all grocery stores are empty, yet almost all houses are occupied, so look how much land is being wasted by grocery stores" would that be fair and representative, or picking and choosing a time to suit my needs?
Even if we do pick and choose in favour of cars, the train is still probably more space efficient even with only around 30-50 people on board so why put yourself in a position where you can be rightfully called out as misrepresentating the data?
For the last part, have you been to London? Outside of 7:30-9:30 and 16:30-20:00 you're pretty much guaranteed a seat anywhere on the network - when you consider that 27% of the capacity of a piccadilly line train is seating, I would call a train that's 10-25% full near empty in the same way that a car with 1 person in would be near empty... And if you look at the streets of London during the day, it's all taxis and vans, generally the taxis are a mix of families and people alone, leaning towards families as it makes more sense financially to get one the more of you there are, and the vans generally have groups of people who are using them for work