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No half measures. !fuckcars@lemmy.world
Fuck cars is like libertarianism. It sounds great at first until you actually really think about it
Full of people who live in big cities and/or small countries. The US is mostly very spread out and sparsely populated. Getting rid of cars just isn't feasible.
Getting rid of cars is inevitable. The amount of resources it takes to maintain anywhere close to a 1:1 suburbanite:car ratio is massively unsustainable. Read that word again. Unsustainable. It doesn't say "makes environmentalists sad", it says "cannot be sustained". Cars will go away, and everyone currently clinging to a car dependant lifestyle will have a bad time.
That was my experience in China. Public transit in cities is fine (though it was all mainly busses, so I don't know the fuck cars community stance on that). But if you want to go anywhere outside of the city center, it required you to either plan out a very detailed itinerary to catch one of the limited number of distant routes, praying to whatever god you believe in that you wouldn't miss your connection, leaving you stranded in some semi-rural neighborhood late at night where you have no choice but to find a bench to sleep on and hope the police don't hassle you, or walk back home for hours in darkness...or buy/rent a car and eliminate the problem entirely.
Even small countries aren't necessarily enough to save you. In Iceland, unless you like in Reykjavik, there is nothing within easy walking distance. The country has exactly one urban center and the rest is small pockets of civilization scattered around a mostly barren countryside. Iceland effectively ends at the city limits of Reykjavik without a car.
That Iceland model is kind of like the US of your imagine a number of other Reykjaviks of different sizes on the continent, all scattered about, some with several hundred miles between them. Here's a population density map. Considering the width is nearly 3000 miles, trying to come up with broad public transportation is tough. We could do a lot better in the high population centers, or between them though.
The point with a majority of the Fuck Cars people is getting better public transit. America builds everything around people having their own cars and has very little in the way of public transit in a vast majority of the country.
Cities aren't very friendly to people without cars here, either, when they should be walkable. Rural areas require cars because they have no trains or busses.
It would be feasible to have less cars if we started building cities in ways that don't need to be driven, and by funding and expanding public transit systems for rural areas.
I'm a big supporter of increased, better public transportation, it just needs to be realistic. In most cases in the US that means it's going to have to work in concert with cars, not replace them.
Change wouldn't happen over night, either. Even if things ever did trend to where no cars period would be feasible, there would be a point at which things were still a hybrid.
But I also think more realistically, self driving, electric cars will be the thing. I know Tesla already has plans for subleasing your vehicle like a time share when you're not driving to become part of a public transit system and while I am not keen on the idea of that being controlled by a company such as Tesla, it's a smart idea that could be adopted by municipalities, counties, states or federally.
Still, that won't lead to perfectly walkable utopias.