572
Electric cars: The equivalent of switching from binge drinking whiskey to binge drinking wine.
(lemmy.ml)
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
572 points (78.6% liked)
Fuck Cars
9821 readers
46 users here now
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.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'd call them less a solution, more an attempt at harm reduction.
And the only things they'll properly resolve are tailpipe emissions and idling noise. At least one of which is of no concern when dealing with the externalities of car traffic.
If you really want to solve the environmental impact of transportation, you minimise the need for transportation. Put homes and workplaces close together, offer mass alternatives for the pairs where you really do need motorised mobility solutions, and minimise the number of situations where it's more convenient to take a car. Ban on-street parking and heavily tax off-street parking. Need to park your car in the city? Hope you can afford to pay an arm and a leg. Oh, you can't? Looks the Park & Ride at the train station two towns over is the nearest alternative. Don't worry though, the trains go six times an hour and a day ticket is, like, four quid max.
The best hope for that to have marginal improvement is a move towards remote work, mostly feaseable for white collar activities.
Anything else is constantly pushed outside and away from residential areas.
I know a few stupid examples of very well planned and thought out industrial parks and long time industrial sites forced to vacate because residential were built 2 or 3km away and residents did not enjoy the movement going back and forward (not through the residential areas, mind that) of trucks and other machines or the sounds coming from a factory when the conditions were just right to carry it over the distance. Needless to say companies simply moved away or closed down activity and the previously complaining residential areas became high unemployment areas.
It's the same absurd reasoning behind people building houses in the middle of nowhere and then demanding power, water and communications connections.
They've done this to our city center. Last time I visited (half a year ago) most of the shops and restaurants had gone out of business and they're contemplating turning the café/mall area into apartments.
Meanwhile, during the same period of time, a huge car mall has started sprawling on the city edge. It's a huge shame really. Used to be a very pleasant area to visit and walk around.
Nowadays it's either take the bus (30+ minutes once every half hour), the bike (30 minutes if the weather is ok and you work up a sweat) or hope there's parking and pay exorbitant rates (10 minutes).
I used to commute to work via public transit, until they put fees on the commuter parking by the train station as well. Slightly more expensive to drive all the way, but way faster (1/2 the time).
So... yeah. The "fuck cars" attitude of my municipality turned me from someone who travels by foot, bike, bus, train and car into someone who travels almost exclusively by car. I need a car, the rest is optional.
...yeah, i tried the public transit thing for awhile and not only spent at least as much money but also increased my commute by four to six times: totally unsustainable, mostly due to anti-infrastructure politics...
...wherever urban real estate is driven by speculative capitalism, walkable neighborhoods are a luxury reserved for the upper class...
Quid: you're British. Great.
You're smaller in area than Texas. It's a little easier for you to stay close to everything, you're never more than 70 miles away from the sea.
Hello, I'm Albertan. Stop saying this. Our governments maintain roads in between these cities every year, there is no reason they couldn't have been train lines instead. Roads are far more expensive than many realize.
Once upon a time, all cities were connected by train, and we ripped it all up to build roads instead. Sure, it's going to cost money to build these up again -- that's what happens when we make a mistake, we have to pay for it in one way or another. But connecting smaller towns and cities is not the herculean impossible task that people seem to want to pretend it is.
There ARE major urban areas in North America. People are not evenly spread out across the landmass equally. Connecting these first is obviously the goal, because that will take care of 70% of the problem already. And always remember not to make perfect the enemy of good - even if we stopped there we'd be in infinitely better shape than we were before.
We've done a ton of that. The Acela is great, I've ridden it a bunch. But that kind of thing doesn't scale as efficiently as you would hope. It can serve corridors of people, but not huge continents of hundreds of millions all that well. There are to many places to be.
Oooh, wow. You’ve been on a train once, look at you!
Trains serve all of Europe you feckless idiot.
How odd, russia has plenty of walkable cities in the largest country on earth.
uS bIg Us CaNnOt HaVe TrAiNs UgA uGa 🤡
Look mate, if you're going to shove the "tHe stATeS arE ToO bIG, thus wE cANNot SOlvE The transIt ProbleM" rhetoric on us, please find another place to wallow in your lack of trains while assuming car industry rhetoric as undeniable fact.
Also, your claim has been debunked and reclarified so often that I'm not going to begin to explain just how wrong you are.
You guys are all idiots. A bunch of Europeans lucked into an infrastructure that works with twice the people in half the space, and you act like it was an intentional and smarter design decision in anticipation of a climate crisis. You shipped your most insane people off your continent to become Americans, and their shitty Calvinism has made everything that has always been terrible about Northern Europe even worse.
Now you want to act like anyone who thinks what you propose isn't exactly easy (or democratic) is some kind of corporate fascist. Fuck off, the lot of you.
Well, that’s not a very productive stance, is it? I thought you thought yourself an ally, yet you just criticise everything here as impossible without producing any plans yourself.
So enlighten us, how do you act on your „desire to fight global warming“?
What I also really want to know is, you posted a video from the Google Photos account of Harry Teasley, claiming it shows your dogs. Are you Harry Teasley, or related to him? Or did you just find this video and thought it was fun to impose as him?