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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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While this is often true, I think there's a habit of comparing apples-to-apples, when they are not the same. Getting to/from the airport is often expensive while train stations are commonly in convenient downtown locations.
Again, I feel like a lot of people over simplify and just go, "My gas is X, the train ticket is Y. X<Y, so driving is cheaper." It completely ignores maintenance costs and depreciation, which are a lot more than people give them credit for.
I don't think it is an oversimplification honestly. It might work out as a favorable arrangement if we're only talking about only moving around within a larger city with robust infrastructure, but the scenario of the post with a 4 hour drive speaks to the fact that this isn't the case.
For driving a fair distance your expenses will be gas, tolls, and parking generally. A long-range train ticket will likely cost more than all those combined and then on top of that you'll still likely have to pay for extended parking and/or other transportation on one side of the trip if you don't have someone you can rely on.
I don't by any means live in the middle of nowhere and the nearest train station to me is still over a two and a half hour drive. I don't enjoy it, but the infrastructure just isn't there to make this a feasible option for many people.
Yep. I live in a suburb outside a major city. To get to the "train station" without a car, I'd need to walk over a mile to the closest bus stop, take that bus up the road to a transfer, take that bus to the light rail station, then take that light rail to the train station. 1 1/2 hours vs 45 minutes driving. And if I'm already driving 45 minutes anyway, I'd rather just stay in my car and go straight to my destination.
Another ignored factor is safety. depending on the city (like mine), public transportation is full of mentally ill and people on drugs. I've seen more fights and freaky shit on public transportation than I have the rest of my life combined. I had to physically intervene a dude harassing my client with autism once and shove him out the door. That was the last time I took public transportation because it's not worth my safety. Thanks drug decriminalization.
Time is a resource that once spent can't be gotten back. I agree that time spent inefficiently is another huge factor, but I don't think that's going to be seen as a strong argument in this community so I intentionally omitted it.
I would be careful about making generalizations linking mental illness and public transport. I know you're commenting based on your own experiences(which are valid), but it's not going to be the case everywhere and will vary depending on the city support systems, which to your credit you did touch on. Any sufficiently large gathering place, regardless of purpose, is going to have its fair share of weirdos in the end.